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Well, nothing has changed. Thousands of paid visitors have bought practically nothing on several different domains. The same domains that produced profitable sales on the same keywords in Google during the past 90 days.
I have no idea what they did but they're out $270,000 this year. A word of advice to anyone advertising there... track everything with your own software and expect the same results from Findwhat. Lots of clicks and no sales.
I am still doing very well on Overture AND Adwords, so I can't agree fully. I can say that I have seen drastic ups and downs though. Some months are much better than others, for no apparent reason.
I would say that you might need to re evaluate the markets you are using, and the keywords you target. Don't forget that Overture made a major change to their advanced (broad) bidding structure. I have found that by only using the Standard match, my dollar goes a lot farther usually.
I find that Overture is better for some markets, while Adwords is better for others. No matter which I use, I track to the dime! If you don't, profits fly out the door.
KG
I do agree concerning Findwhat though.. worthless clicks..
-qwik
Have you ever done this? CHeck to see how much the first 5 bids are. Let's say the top is .65 and the 5th is .60. If you look at the guy that is paying .10, you will see the ad OCCASIONALLY when you refresh about a bazillion times on the right hand sponsored results. Meanwhile, the top three - 5 people , mostly the top three..remain in the top and bottom portion of the sponsored results.
Before it wasn't like this. I checked this out way back when, and did again just recently. ANd noticed a drastic difference. It may just be me, I may be mistaken..But I would be interested in knowing what others think of this.
Personally, I can think of about a bazillion different methods to put that $270k to use john, that will yield probably 5x's the sales that you saw at your best times with Overture. A friend of mine advertised with a well known 'shock jock' whom I think we all know who I am talking about for $25k..and he saw more sales from that in 2 weeks, than he saw in 2 years using overture.
S
On a side note, I run 5 newsletters on a variety of topics and since I've turned off the Overture ads, subscription rates have remained the same. This is something I didn't expect. Logically you would think that if you cut the amount of people coming to a site, the signups for a newsletter would follow the traffic trend.... It didn't happen.
A basic example is one site I promote gets 60-65 signups for the newsletter a day. I used to send 800-1000 Overture visitors in there per day. Despite cutting these visitors out, I'm still getting 60-65 signups a day. It really makes me wonder what exactly these visitors were doing clicking my ads, not buying anything and not signing up for a freebie. While every other traffic source was buying stuff and signing up for the newsletter.
... but it does not seem to matter. I checked the conversion rate for the last month, and it has been miserable. And losing 98% of our listings does not seem to have affected our sales in the tiniest bit.
It's been 74 days without Overture... 2 days ago I spent $2,000 to have roughly 3,500 targeted OV leads come to my sites. I had 4 sales totaling $130. It's astounding that in the middle of the "hot" sales season, OV failed miserably.
If any OV rep is out there reading this, your traffic still SUCKS!
We always bid on page 2 or page 3, never on page 1.
I find that if the customer cares enought to search deeper for results, they are better qualified.
Its better to have a lower volume of qualfied traffic rather than a high volume of lookers only.
Should really be able to focus on US or other geo-targeted efforts.
Also, your keywords need to be great.. not just good, but great.
Not sure how you blew through 2 grand that fast.. sounds like a bad market to begin with no matter which PPC you choose.
