Account goes offline suddenly...

A/c balance from sufficient to nil!

[Inquisitive]

Hi,

I just wanted to know if anyone else had a problem as mine:

When I checked up my a/c balance it had enough funds for 2+ days.Now when I refreshed the page after sometime, there came my shock!The funds vanished and the a/c went offline...

I doubt its a case of fraud or some back-end problem at Overture..

What say u?

[werty]

It very well could be fraud. I would look at your statistics tomorrow...if you see a term that normally has 50 impressions skyrocket to 1200 and its CTR go from 3% to 18% then I would report it.

If you have a high quality log analysis software package you should be able to determine if the clicks were fraudulent or not, just by seeing if they stay on the page. The more info you can gather the better when you make a claim that you had fraudulent clicks...If they come back and say that they did not determine that you did get fraudulent clicks and you can prove that you did, you can get a refund/credit.

[eWhisper]

This can also be a problem with content syndication. I had one client who insisted using content sites for more exposure until they got 1500 clicks in an hour (for a site that's use to 1500 in a week from OV) when a newsletter went out that included their paid links.

Overture is allowing content syndication of ads in pretty much any way their partners want them to use it, which has caused a lot of account problems for people.

[Inquisitive]

I checked up my daily statistics.And I see a sudden hike(more than 30%) in both impressions and clicks for couple of my important keywords.
My CTR is more or less same.

Also, I have been using content match option from the day 1.All these days I have had no problems with my CTR.

Have reported the same to OV.I guess I need to get a fraud check done.

[redzone]

What you need to do (if you are going to replenish your account), is turn content match OFF, now....

After this weekend, you will be able to bid on keywords seperately for "content match", and not affect your bids for normal distribution channels (MSN/Yahoo/etc)..

But until then, I would strongly advise to turn it off.