Overture closes for 18 hours tomorrow?

Are they about to spring something on us?

[Tropical Island]

Anybody have any idea what's happenning tomorrow with the 18 hour shutdown?

[Kandevil]

No springing, just a system upgrade/expansion I think. Usually find things like this happening over the bank holiday weekends, gives them a chance to make sure everything is working properly by Tuesday and also because submissions/queries are generally less over weekends/bank holidays so it's a good time for them to work on the system.

[TomWaits]

Maybe they're brainstorming to bring the GoTo name back.

[Tropical Island]

Normally their shutdowns are much shorter - under 6 hours.
Usually when it's this long they are making a major change.

Maybe increasing all bids to $1.00? hehe..

[Mike_Mackin]

That's funny Tropical Island

"we perform a systems upgrade" usually means a systems upgrade

When they use the word "enhancements" we should get worried ;)

[Brett_Tabke]

Is this anywhere on their site?

[EliteWeb]

Should anything be offline due to upgrades something fun is going to happen with some of their networking and such to make sure evertything is going fine. You'd figure a company would have more than a single server because I do and that they really could do maintance without even having a websurfer see offline just by changing dns stuff :D But then again Paypal and ebay do offline periods. I wonder what exactly they do when they're offline.

[Kurupt]

It seems like they go down for "upgrades" ALL the time. How many times have they upgraded in the last 5-6 months...like 5 times?

[Mike_Mackin]

>Is this anywhere on their site?
It is posted top right when you log into the DTC
! DIRECTRAFFIC CENTER SYSTEMS UPGRADE:
LONG paragraph.....

[edited by: Mike_Mackin at 5:25 pm (utc) on May 1, 2003]

[agerhart]

Is this anywhere on their site?

I couldn't find it either Brett.

[Brett_Tabke]

Thanks Mike - I was looking in the press release section and my inbox - for something public we could link to here.

[Kandevil]

It's showing on the advertiser login page for me. I first noticed it on the UK login page.

Exact text:

DIRECTRAFFIC CENTRE SYSTEMS UPGRADE:

The DirecTraffic Centre will be unavailable for approximately 18 hours from 3:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. GMT on Saturday, May 3rd while we perform a system upgrade. We apologise for any inconvenience.

[sem4u]

Hopefully they will have faster reporting.

[martinibuster]

Dan Boberg at PubCon mentioned something about considering a "comments" field in the Add Listing and Modification screens of the DirecTraffic Center to cut down on editorial snafus.

That would be very nice.

[Ryan_Lash]

Word on the web is that Overture is implementing their conversion tracking tool this weekend.

It will be interesting to see how detailed the reporting will be in comparison to 3rd-party tools.

[duckhunter]

Sounds like their going all or nothing. I've been part of several large web pushes and upgrades such as this and it can be alot of fun or your worst nightmare. An 18 hour day doesn't seem bad if it's all working.

Wonder what the rollback plan is?

[pmac]

An email should have been in order for that kind of downtime I reckon.

[Tropical Island]

"An email should have been in order for that kind of downtime I reckon."

It has been published in their advertiser center after login for well over a week.

[ggrot]

Whoops, all bids have been pushed to $15.00/click. Please login to your account in 18 hours and fix them.

[ogletree]

The way I read it is that you just won't be able to log in to make changes. It looks like the ads will still show up on Yahoo.

[EBear]

Brett, they've now moved it up a level to a public page. It's at
[secure.overture.com...]

The Style Codes won't let me create a hyperlink to a secure site - I tried all versions of [URL] :(

[martinibuster]

Here's the scoop: Overture is making changes to the DTC.

Among the changes:

1. They are going to start showing Impressions.

2. There will be a graph with a rating of 1-5 (5 is good), that rates your search term performance.

3. Under-performing keywords will be weeded out.

4. Summary reports will now have totals at the bottom.
   

How do I know? I called them up in Pasadena and asked.

[Tropical Island]

Just checked - the advertiser center is now open again. Nothing seems to be working correctly. Tried to access a number of different pages for traffic reports and got pages that were from March. When I tried to enter the correct dates it reverted to the March dates.

[gramski]

Well overture seems to be working OK again now, their new bits seem to be very similar to adwords now. I don't know if its a coincidence but they just approved a new listing for me in 15 minutes. In the past it has taken a day or two for them to approve listings. So it all seems good.

[nyehouse]

Not entirely related but I noticed an interesting quirk in the inventory.overture.com suggestion tool. If you look for the term "sales" or any term with the word sales in it, it returns no results.

I wonder if they hard coded this to prevent people from finding popular for sales as an anti-competitive measure. Does not make sense.

Has anyone noticed any other words that do not work but clearly have lots of matches.

Tim

[Mike_Mackin]

nyehouse:

use the word "sale"
Must be a MatchDriver prolllllem

[Kurupt]

Wow now that Overture shows impressions they are really making Adwords look good on certain terms. I wonder if they will implement a system similar to Adwords where terms have to reach a certain CTR percentage or you recieve a warning.

[dvduval]

At least it's not Google closing for maintenance for 18 hours.

[IanTurner]

Will their results still appear on the third party sites or do you think theywill just display raw results?