Overture partner Webshots.com - a $$$$ problem

[Troppo]

Today we went through a normal 1 month budget spend with Overture in about 16 hours. Most all of this traffic originated from searches on a Photographic Image Sale and exchange site.

A check shows that people searching there for photographs are seeing Overture results at the bottom of the page but accompanied by an image copied from the advertizers website. We are a travel site and the type of search terms used to find us are similar to what people use to look for popular photos.

This is not the kind of traffic likely to produce business for us but I can't see any way to turn it off. The big problem is that at the current rate it destroys ROI by increasing the advertising spend 30 times over with no chance of a corresponding conversion increase.

Is anybody else having this problem and ideally aware of a fix for it? I'm thinking that copying the image from our site, reducing it's size etc without permission and inserting it with the Overture ad must be some kind of infringement.

[Tropical Island]

If you look at [webmasterworld.com...] you will see that we thought this problem was coming from FindWhat however we now realize that it is Overture. Many of our listings appear in both.

We found a huge spike in traffic from Webshots through their affiliate Ditto. We suddenly jumped from 0 traffic to 80 or 90 refferals in 3 days. This is obviuosly bogus traffic as the searchers are just looking for photos not accommodations. The ROI is therefore nil.

This appears to be just another step in Overture's road to increasing our costs and their bottom line with traffic from Gator, WebShots, Ditto and others. It will eventually catch up with them with diluted ROI. We are already noticing less advertisers and lower bids in many of our search terms.

[Troppo]

See what you mean and yes the situation described in the other thread is exactly what’s happening with us. The damage this time is bigger as the single word term is quite popular in the US domestic market with a top bid of $2.47. Our position was carefully established lower down the list to capture the more than casually interested searcher who might be persuaded to go offshore. This produced 2 or 3 clicks a week and a small number of profitable conversions per year. The Webshots caper produced 72 photo seeking clickers yesterday but has now thankfully stopped …to add insult to injury however I just got the “Great News etc” low funds email from Overture.

Hopefully somebody from Overture reads this forum and if so should take careful note of the comment in the post above about diluting the ROI of their clients. This is a silly thing to do and will quickly devalue the service with a consequent decline in advertiser interest. They should consider explaining any of these radically new programs more widely to their customers and allow them to opt in/out of each one depending on individual suitability.

[Tropical Island]

The "opting in or out" has been a continuing complaint about Overture throughout this forum for some time probably because you can do it in AdWords.

With Google continuing to cut into Over's traffic and their move to suspect partners to drive more traffic they have entered a downhill course. As ROI drops and Adword costs remain lower for many terms then they will lose more advertisers. I believe that at this point in their desperation the only thing they will listen to is advertisers cutting back or leaving entirely. They have to go back to their roots which was providing an affordable PPC for small and mid size businesses with partners that will provide decent ROI.