overture tracking var causes 404's from yahoo

[jatar_k]

As I always have, I put a source=overture on a recent listing, went live monday. Checked it when it went live etc, no problems. I got a frantic call from the client tonight and she informs me her listing is broken. I had no idea what she was talking about.

I search on yahoo for the keyword and the source string is showing in the url and there is a trailing slash after the source=overture. This causes the link to 404 (had to charge my self money, not impressed). I check it on as many overture affiliates as I can think of and it works fine (costing me more money).

In the thousands (and thousands) of kw's I've done I've never seen this. Anyone else had anything like this happen?

[jatar_k]

I assume no one has had this happen either. I haven't heard back from overture yet.

[webdiversity]

I do belive that Overture don't have a totally automated process of transferring the URL submit across to their systems. I once had several dozen keywords showing with the domain name written twice in the middle of our tracking url.

As a result of that, and as standard good practise we always check the listing details, to marry them up with the URL's we submit. Because we use trcking URL's they always have the same format so it's not that difficult to check them and you don't need to click them to see if the link works. If you have checked the URL that you submitted at the time of submitting it to Overture (or any PPC) then it will work, 100% of the time.

From your Manage Listings tab if you click on the listing information tab you can see all the URL's, if you printed off the list from the Editorial Status section then you can check them that way.

As you rightly point out the clicks will still get charged on pages that are not there, be it a 404 or the site is down.

A major site we checked the other day had a sign up saying their site was down for essential maintenance, but all of their PPC ads were still running at full cost, which is just madness.