More Overture Clicks From 3rd Party Sites

than MSN and Yahoo

[dvduval]

So I just got one of those $50 trial accounts. I'm getting hammered with hits from directories and search engines I've never seen before. It's about 10 of these for every 1 Yahoo or MSN click. Strange that I don't ever get hits from these people on any of my other big sites. I guess this was a great way to verify that Overture is still not a good place for me to spend my money.

(I quit Overture over a year ago because I felt I was getting ripped off. First, they kept changing the deal. Second, I felt I was getting too many fraudulent clicks.)

[sem4u]

That does sound quite unusual as the bulk of clicks are expected from Yahoo & MSN.

Have you tried searching for your keywords (or related keywords) in Google & Yahoo to see if any of these directories / search engines turn up in the SERPs?

[Marcia]

Kind of makes you wonder if they're from browser hijacks. Are they all IE from those other sites?

[Bobby_Davro]

What is the quality of the traffic like from those sites, and do you make a profit from it?

[dvduval]

It's almost exclusively single visits to the homepage, and then the visitor leaves. Coming from places like shopnav, retrosheet and goggles...I have never even heard of these places, but they are certainly using up my credits.

[keywordguru]

I have seen the same. Not as much from Overture, but from the smaller PPC networks, these one hit clicks are horrible. I would imagine that those small search engines either are using automated fraudulent clickers, or have some type of tie in with those junk "100,000 targetted visitors to your site" packages they sell everywhere that are said to not work at all.

All in all, I do turn conversions from all of the PPC networks, yet some are better than others. I find that if you use Niche Keywords in Niche Markets, your click through rates will be a LOT BETTER resulting in less clicks, less money spent, and possibly better sales conversions. Bottom line, when in doubt, bid on the less competitive and less clicked, this way when they are clicked, the click will actually count!
Happy PPC'ing

[echo2003]

Overture supplies "sponsored" search results to domain parking pages, mostly proper word domain names that attract type in traffic. It may be these websites that are sending you traffic that is not converting, especially if the domain name is not relevant to your product/service

[beren]

I typically get one-third from MSN, one-third from Yahoo, and one-third from all others. Those others include credible places like Dogpile and AltaVista, and less-than-credible places like the ones you mentioned.

It's unfortunate, but I think marketers have to accept the sleaze factor as a cost of doing business when using PPC. Overall, Overture has less sleaze than the smaller PPC services like Kanoodle and Enhance, and worst of all Google AdSense. This explains why keyword prices are typically higher on Overture than on the smaller PPC services.

[Blue Gravity]

Are you getting a lot of hits from "Ultsearch" or "UltimateSearch"? Because that guy has over 150,000 domains, and uses Overture as his primary sponsor for search results. From what I've heard though, his traffic is pretty decent.

[edit_g]

It's almost exclusively single visits to the homepage

Sending visitors through to the appropriate product page (as opposed to the homepage) may also help with stickyness.

[echo2003]

It is very interesting that Oingo.com used to partner with Goto, and continued the relationship when they changed their name to Overture, using Overture as a provider of paid search results for their network of parked domains.

Details are on an old webmasterworld thread at [webmasterworld.com...]
but Oingo now seem to use Google - see [oingo.com...] and click "domain name solutions"

[Marcia]

Blue Gravity, there is someone whose website traffic has been hijacked by another site, and it tracks back to either the company you mentioned or a cloaking job that's using one of their domains as a cover.

[jimbeetle]

but Oingo now seem to use Google

There really isn't an Oingo any more. Name changed to Applied Semantics, which was bought by Google about a year and a half ago. Major reason was to use its technology for Adsense and related products.