How very odd...

Overture listings weirdness

[bill1234]

So, I was playing with MSN, looking at our competition on Overture. Clicked on the top listing on one.. and got through to a completely different company than was listed.

Sat and stared for a while, and looked through the site trying to figure it out. Seemed to be a site about advertising on the web. Rang Overture - they couldn't figure it out either. Finally, rang our competition to let them know because I figured they probably wouldn't be happy at having their money wasted that way.

Does anyone know how this could happen? The URL at the bottom of the listing is NOT the URL you get taken to. It's not a redirect - I checked that too.

Sticky me if you want to do the search yourself, though I don't know how long Overture'll leave it up there now I've called them to ask about it.

[vibgyor79]

What did your competitor say?

[seth_wilde]

Not sure this is the case, but Overture can mask listings to show one url and send visitors to another..

[Nieder3d]

Masking the URL is fairly simple to do. In fact I had a site that roar.com bought up from under my nose and I was still running cpc listings to that URL before I found out. Still had the same display url in the listing but it all went to roar.

I ran into a similiar situation today when surfing through some sales leads. A large number of URL's went to dif pages.
j

[bill1234]

What did your competitor say?

*snicker*Didn't get through directly to the person who ran their listings, but when I showed the person I DID get through to they didn't sound best pleased.

Masked listings? Really? Now that's interesting as the company it DID go through to was an advertising company that most likely had managed PPC somewhere in their efforts. Without clicking on their own listing and running up their costs, all the company would see from the SERPs page was that they were indeed on there...

I've heard of dirty tricks, but that's a NASTY thing to do.

[webdiversity]

How do you know it's not a redirect?

If you use tracking URL's the one that shows is not the one that it ends up at (unless you just append the source=overture to the end, but that's not a true tracking URL. None of the ads we run will end up at the URL displayed.

Overture periodically spot check the destination URL to ensure that the landing page they saw when they approved the ads are still the ones they see. We see activity in our logs to support this.

It's possible to have multiple landing pages, or multiple versions of the same page, to test out different copy, all from within the one ad, with one keyword, gives you a chance to test out different copy to see what results you get.

I'd be more annoyed that one of my competitors was clicking on one of my ads! But I guess it goes with the territory.

[bill1234]

How do you know it's not a redirect?

Because I asked Overture? *G* I was chatting to the rep. about it 'cause it looked very weird and he checked for me. Not a redirect.

Also because I actually copy-pasted the URL beneath the listing into my browser listing and that didn't redirect me to the same site.