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This is my first post at WebmasterWorld. I've read posts here for quite some time and have been impressed with the expertise of its members and now find the need to ask a question because I'm just not communicating well with Overture.
I love Overture and have had better ROI with them than with Adwords. However, I'm really trying to manage my bidding without an hourly routine of checking my position.
I selected 8 of our most popular keywords and chose to set them on Autobid. I set it to keep me in third place and my max bid even exceeded the bid amount of the number one position on those keywords. I received confirmation from Overture that the autobids were successful and checked to make sure that I was in third. I was, but the next day I checked I was in fourth place and the third place bid that ousted me was WAY below what I set for my max bid, yet I was dropped to third.
I have payments set to automatically occur, so it's not that. I set autobid individually as well because I thought that selecting all 8 keywords and setting a max bid might have divided it between all the keywords. However, that too did not work.
All my interaction with Overture proves useless. Perhaps the autobid feature only outbids a competitor once or twice and then is turned off?
Any insights?
Frustrated in Cyberspace,
King Arthur
That auto bid you are using is a one time shot. It only updates your bid once. If you want to have your bid updated every hour you need to use a software like bidrank or gotoast.com.
There is no way everyone could use autobid and have Overture do all the management as multiple people want the same posistions.
Autobid is for that moment when your request goes through. 5 seconds later, your positions could be different.
There are several good 3rd party management solutions out there that will check your bid (a max of 48 times a day I belive), and automatically adjust your bid/position, etc based on a set of rules you define.
You are allowed to log in and update your account even more often as to go above the max allowed autobids by 3rd parties.
Looks as though you are a first time poster too. Great!
I'm wondering why I received the impression that Overture's Autobid would keep me in the place that I set it to. This would explain a lot. You're SURE there's no way within Overture to maintain a certain bid?
Here's my next question: Overture has some licensed third party vendors when it comes to managing your PPC campaigns. Here's a quote from Overture's FAQs:
Question: Who are the approved third party vendors?
Answer : Currently, Overture has issued licensing agreements to the following third party tools: BidBuddy, BidRank, Dynamic Keyword Bid Maximizer, GoToast, Keyword Max, Maestro, PPCBidTracker, PPC Pro and Traffic Patrol.
Do you have any experience with any of these tools? Goods? Bads? I've not yet looked into these tools though I'm quickly coming to that point because of all the inconveniences that exist in managing several PPC accounts at once.
Do any of these tools allow Google Adwords and bidding and management as well? Perhaps Espotting/Findwhat?
Things looking up in Cyberspace,
King Arthur
Thanks for the warm welcome!
Good point about everyone bidding for the same place. I often thought about that too. I wondered what would happen if two sites bid on the same keyword and set their max bids very high...it would soon have both site owners paying quite a bid with Overture outbidding each one and then the next until their max bids were reached.
So do you know much about the third party tools? I hope that this can be discussed without breaking the "non-promotional" guidelines. If there are other posts that discuss this that would be great! I'll have a look.
Gratefully,
King Arthur
Most of them have a free trial, and seeing which one you like is more imporntant than what others think.
A few also have tracking/conversion info, and if the advantage of those is that everything is in one interface instead of looking in multiple places.
I personally don't feel there is a good 3rd party tool to manage AdWords because CTR matters so much for AdWords, and there is not public information about others bidding statistics, so position bidding is a guess, not an absolute.
Several of the software's can also manage the smaller PPCs.
If you look through past discussions of the PCC Forum [webmasterworld.com] or do a WW site search, you'll find several threads discussing these tools.
Thanks for the good tip on AdWords. That is a strange beast and Google does like to keep things pretty hush hush.
One of our guys went to a Search Engine Marketing convention and at the round table discussion the panelists talked about how to optimize your website for good search engine placement. Among the panelists was a man from Google. He sat back and listened to everyone give suggestions and at the very end he leaned forward and said, "Some of what you've just heard is right and some of it isn't."
They're a fun company, but man, they guard their secrets.
I'll search WW for third party tool overviews.
Thanks,
Gettin' the Hang of it in Cyberspace,
King Arthur
Shak
What about GoToast makes it stand up above the rest?
King Arthur
