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Has anybody else noticed the same thing?
Did OV sign up some new partners?
Has OV gone insane?
Has OV gone insane?
Yes! You have to take all of their reporting with a grain of salt these days.
The only reliable stats on Overture are your account balance and your bid position.
If you notice a lot of impressions and clicks on that word,
then you know that overture is tricking you.
BTW Praseodymium is a rare earth element with few uses.
Was it just on the 27th?
That is the day I am wondering about.
On one account, the impressions went from 10K to 90K!
Maybe when/if things get straightened out, I will re-activate them.
-Bino
Now off to see if I can restrict where the ads appear.
Real nice trick from the fine folks at OV to get a bunch more income.
Real nice trick from the fine folks at OV to get a bunch more income.
Absolutely nothing wrong with this deal for us. Our DE traffic had dropped to virtually nothing.
I wonder if the HUGE jump in impressions was because of the yahoo-europe deal.
Can't beleive traffic in our little niche area is up 300% and that doesn't explain the jump in USA traffic which is also up 300% since the 27th.
No, Over is just continuing with their screwups since the changeover to the new software program. They are almost at the point where the code is so corrupted and badlly wriiten that they should just redo the whole thing and start over.
Shipping our products to Europe is way too expensive so any bandwidth or PPC is wasted money.
We do not want any European traffic. Zero!
You will only appear in Yahoo DE if you are advertising in Over DE, likewise if you use Over UK then you will be in Yahoo UK.
If you only advertise in the US then you will not be affected.
How do you set the listings to appear in the US only?
It is a real leap of faith to have confidence in the click-thru numbers when the impression numbers are all f'd up.
DIRECTRAFFIC CENTER SYSTEMS UPGRADE THIS WEEKEND: The DirecTraffic Center® will be unavailable for approximately 10 hours beginning Saturday, November 8, 2003 at 4:00 p.m. PST through 2:00 a.m. PST on Sunday, November 9, 2003 while we perform a systems upgrade. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Does anyone think this is going to help?
I need to be able to track clicks, impressions, rankings and costs in real time - not days later when I've been charged far more than I was willing to spend.
I have fired off another email this morning and hope they will do something to rectify the situation. In the meantime I'll just use Google which is so simple by comparison.
I'd be grateful to know if I've just been unlucky or whether this is par for the course. Like someone else said - the only stat that is in real time seems to be the amount left in the account!
Cheers,
Jack.
Couldn't agree more.
I'd be grateful to know if I've just been unlucky or whether this is par for the course.
If you got the time - maybe while waiting for Over's pages to load - have a look back through this forum and you will see a continuous litany of complaints about the reports. They have not improved in the last six months. There was some excuse posted some time ago by an Over sympathiser that the delays have something to do with their click protection program however it doesn't seem to hold up Google or FindWhat.
It's 6.30 pm here and I've just seen my results from yesterday - albeit, just the financial summary in the Account section. The reports still give me the numbers from 2 days ago.
Don't get me wrong - the CTR is good and I would like to get the traffic from the sites Overture covers, but I need to be able to make adjustments on an hourly basis, if necessary. The other strange thing is that I'm getting 99% of the clicks on one single listing even though I've got around 30 - the same ones I use on Google Adwords, where I get a good spread of clicks.
Anyway, I'm waiting for a response from Overture - I'll read the previous messages as you suggest and see what they come up with.
Cheers,
Jack.
It seems the upgrade they did a week ago, is well, not working. The tech people (as usual) were unavailable, and I could hear my rep just shaking his head over the phone as if he'd gotten a hundred calls this week so far by people unable to get anything done in the accounts.
I'm not a huge fan of Overture, although I see good results from it, but right now, it seems that the company is even bewildering their employees with its ineptness.
Wish they'd make it consistent - hate trying to remember the good range of positions for every keyword.
That is why we put up with OV. I do not think anyone is impressed with the service.
Seems like I picked a particularly bad time to start the service. I'll see what they come back with and then decide how best to proceed. I'm all for second chances - just that a few days of pulling my hair out was getting to me.
Cheers,
Jack.
Might just need to make an account and tough it through until you figure out how best to proceed - as at present, there's not going to be a good time to open an account anytime in the near future.
Maybe Overture Guy could come forward :)
The part about their "up-to-date" report made me laugh - "The report available that is the most up to date is the Intra-Day Account Activity Detail report, this report is updated approximately every eight hours." Wow - every 8 hours - that means in the course of my working day I might not get a current report at all!
I work in IT - I work with computers - what on earth makes anyone in this day and age think that 8 hour old data is "up-to-date"? Especially when the other big player in the market seems to be able to deliver the same information in close to real time.
Reading between the lines, it looks like Overture staff are, indeed, frustrated with their own system. The email mentioned frequent upgrades - not sure if these are the cause or the cure!
However, the most amazing point in their response was concerning the fact that I received far more clickthroughs than I had funds in my pre-paid account -
"at times your account may receive traffic after your account has depleted funds, if your account is set up under the Pre Payment Plan, we do not charge you for this additional activity." I had around $50 in the account for test purposes and they sent me clickthoughs amounting to around $125. They did the same again the next day. I am only one account holder - multiply this by the number of customers in the same position and Overture is costing itself a fortune! Why do they not simply stop serving ads once the account reaches $0? It's a computer program - it's easy - or am I missing something? Google manages to do it, within a small margin that they tell you about upfront. Sometimes they are a few dollars either side, but I can live with that. On the other hand - free advertising as part of the service - maybe I'll reactivate the account LOL.
I won't give up on them just yet, but I'm amazed at the fact that anyone running a business can put up with these failings.
Cheers,
Jack.
Yes, I like it when I receive overdelivery credits from AdWords. :)
Overture do need to sort out their technical issues, especially reporting - whatever happened to the promised intra-day reporting? They can't even bring up the stats for 'yesterday' properly!
