International listings?

[tsomers]

Are my Overture listings appearing internationally?

I'd rather they didn't. Can we set this as we can with Google?

How about FindWhat and Lycos? Do they go internationally and can we set this preference?

I'm also concerned about fraudulent clicks from mom and pop websites who receive $ from Overture, FindWhat and maybe Lycos for searches performed on their personal websites. And especially from international websites where this type of fraud may be more prevelant.

Thanks.

[webdiversity]

Overture offer search results in UK, France, Germany, Japan and the US.

FindWhat and Lycos only show their results to US eyeballs.

Mom and Pop web sites don't receive money from Overture for clicks. The only beneficiaries of revenue share will be sites with a significant volume of search instigated traffic ( I believe it's over a million searches a month, but I'll stand to be corrected on that).

Click spam is more prevalent on the lesser known PPC's. All of the big guys take it very seriously (or so they say!), because advertisers would desert them quicker than rats from a sinking ship if they knew that click fraud was rife and no action was taken.

Admittedly, on some PPC's there is a foreign connection with the visitors, but if you implement a robust click tracking solution, you will be able to identify it happening and take action to get it stopped, but the caveat "buyer beware" exists and it's been talked about and written about often enough for people to know that there are not a massive amount of serious PPC providers and if you use an unknown one and they bleed your credit card then you can only blame yourself.

I haven't seen numbers, but when we look at bids on keywords , the top 10 is riddled with advertisers paying over the odds, through poor bid management. This is probably worse of a crime than click fraud, because it happens right under your nose, yet no action is taken, either by Overture (and why should they?) or by the advertiser or the competition. Our numbers make the figure about 70% of advertisers in a lot of less competitive arenas and 50% in competitive.

3 cents a click more than you should be paying on say 10,000 clicks in a month works out to $300 over-spent.....

[tsomers]

I don't want my Overture, FindWhat or Lycos listings showing internationally. They will be wasted clicks and money for my business. Can I turn them off as we can with Google?

I can't see anything on the Overture settings or FindWhat or Lycos settings to do so.

Thanks.

[veritysystems]

Some sites filter by IP address and some by search engine.

E.g. Yahoo.com users from the UK see Overture UK results when searching worldwide; MSN.com searchers see Overture USA results from the UK - confusing, I know!

Google Adwords allows you to select which countries you would like your ads shown in (by IP).

Hope this helps!

[tsomers]

Here is what I received from Overture regarding our inability to chose the countries in which our listings are shown.

From Overture:

Thank you for your inquiry.

While Overture does not have the ability to block your listing from consumers outside the US, there is something you can do. We suggest that if you do not wish to have users outside the US view your site, you state that in your title and description. EXAMPLE: "Service only within the US"

Doing this should defer users outside the US from clicking on your site. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you, and appreciate your understanding.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if we can be of any further assistance.

[veritysystems]

It doesn't really help though, plus it uses up your title and keywords characters.