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However, we seem to have a competitor who has managed to get around this rule. They aren't a large company that has hired outside people to do their PPC work, all their PPC stuff is run by the company owner, and they don't have any 24 hour staff. Although, the owner has been known to hire programmers to make some very unique pieces of software.
They have also had many accounts discontinued by Overture (5 in the past 2 months) because of violating the TOS and bidding on the same keywords with multiple accounts.
They change their bids within 15 minutes of any bid changes we make. I had some 24 hr support staff keep Overture open and make a bid change every 5 minutes yesterday for 24 hours straight.
Our competition made 156 bid changes yesterday - all within 15 minutes of our change, and most within 5 minutes.
The only way this would not violate Overture's TOS is if a person was making manual changes, which I know they aren't using.
The only way I can see getting around this is if a specific program was written where Overture thought someone was manually making changes and hitting the update bid button.
I don't know much about programming, but is this possible? A program that runs inside the browser, and can read the bids, and make bid gap and position change changes automatically? The bidding rules are pretty specific for their changes, and seems to have all the features you'd find in GoToast bid management.
Or any other ideas how someone would manage this without having someone sit there 24 hours a day?
What some advertisers might do is to use their 48 enquiries only between say 9-5, so in theory you could have 48 enquiries in 8 hours, or 6 an hour (once every 10 minutes).
A program that runs inside the browser, and can read the bids, and make bid gap and position change changes automatically? The bidding rules are pretty specific for their changes, and seems to have all the features you'd find in GoToast bid management.
Sure but not necessarily inside a browser. A custom program could do that, but it would need certain "features" to prevent being flagged as a suspicious user. It would need manual intervention to log in. Don't leave it running all day and night.
It might be cheaper and legit to take the concept offshore and pay humans to do it. The biggest risk in using a program is during the test phase.
In GoToast I once had a 48x account but it was severe overkill (and expensive). In my boring niche, twice a day seems fine for now.
Although, interesting enough, the people who were doing this updating every 15 minutes suddenly either don't have accounts any longer, or are only updating ever 12 hours now - wonder if they got caught...
