Overture says I'm #2, BUT.....

[bostonseo]

When I log into my account, there are a number of keywords that I have #1 on for the last 6+ months (if not more). Recentlty, approximately 7 terms are saying that I am now ranked #2 (when I look at my bid position in the Direct Traffic Center); however when I search on that keyword on Yahoo.com and MSN.com I am still position #1.

This is pretty odd and serious. Serious because if I really want to be #1 (and didn't know that I was already) I would raise my bid and so would the other person that is incorrectly stated as #1...rising the overall CPC price.

My point is that this flaw in their system could cause me to raise prices and they would make more $$$$. Has anyone else experienced this? Where the DTC said you were 1 position but when you searched you were something different.

[redzone]

BostonSEO,
Though it's odd, it's really not that serious when it comes to your statement about raising bid prices. You "always" pay $.01 more than the next lowest advertiser..

Regardless if you are #1, or suffering the Overture ghost bidder syndrome.... :)

[eWhisper]

Are you checking your ads on pages that show Overture Local results?

They haven't fully integrated Local into the DTC yet to show bids, but those results are intermingled in some searches, based on geographic areas.

Local results are not shown in the 'view bids' page, you must do a search on Yahoo or a partner showing these ads.

[bostonseo]

"Are you checking your ads on pages that show Overture Local results?"

Noope. This pertains to a regular search on Yahoo.com for
a fairly highly traffic keyword. It makes no sense why this is happening, and to only a handful of terms.

I really don't care that the DTC says that I am 2nd, when I know I am 1st.

[Bidman]

BostonSeo,
Here is a possible scenario. The Direct Traffic Center says your in 2nd so you probably are. The guy in 1st place probably has a low monthly budget so his add doesnt show very frequently. So most of the time your are going to show up in 1st position even though you are bidding in 2nd position because of his ad is only showing periodically due to his budget restraints. He might be a new competitor or might be a vendor trying to get some limited exposure so other advertisers see him. Hope this helps.

[KGirl]

The Ghost bidding seems pretty unethical to me. Overture is making money by forcing people to bid a penny above this ghost bidder who isn't really showing up. When confronted with this, Overture said "they are an active account, but on a budget". This is like bidding against someone at an auction who has no money or intention of winning the auction item. Isn't there a law against "plants" like that at auctions?

Overture has done the math on this behind boardroom doors and knows allowing this ghost bidding will make them $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. Someone needs to do thing about this.

[Wlauzon]

So if I am "on a budget", I could bid like $20 for the best keywords, and then budget $20 a month for them and force the high bids to appear to be $20?

What am I missing here?

[bostonseo]

KGirl this is very interesting and something I will bring up with my Platinum Account manager. I suspect there are numerous illegal business activities Overture and others' would be found in violation of if you ever took them to court. Problem is, it would cost you $$$$ to ever take legal action.

Enough complaints to the Attorney General's office though
should at least get Overture and Google on their 'radar'.

[KGirl]

Yes Wlauzon,
You are correct. You could use this ghost bidding as a weapon. If you make a high bid and low budget, you could fool your competitors into bidding above that and they WILL be charged a penny above the ghost bid. This is happening to my company right now and it is costing me $200 to $300 A DAY!

BOSTONSEO: When you call your platinum rep. their prepared response will be "We don't tell you what to bid"---that is if they have handled this problem before. We had to "train" our rep to understand this problem and when they took it to their supervisor, this is the answer the top brass sent back.

If click fraud doesn't get them, this will.

[KGirl]

...BTW, the reason this problem is hurting me is that two of my competitors DON'T get it and they are bidding way above the Ghost. If I want to be in the top three, I have to bid above the Ghost too. I cannot tell my competitors because they would probably capitalize on it.

[Jmez]

This is happening so much as of late I am wondering if there was some publication that everyone has read and is now trying this method. This is annoying but in my opinion not that much of a factor.
Your only paying $.01 more than the ghost bidder when they are showing up in the search results.
So for instance if the bids look like this
$1.89 $1.88 $1.22 with the ghost bidder being at $1.88. Obviously the ghost bidder has a small budget and I am sure you are all noticing that they are only seldomly showing up in the search results thus only those few random times that they show up and you incidentally get a click are you going to pay that $1.89. The rest of the time you will only pay $.01 above the 3rd place bid of $1.22.
In my opinion the only way you can really get hurt by these ghost bidders is if you get into a bidding war with them thus causing the whole group to shift their bids upwards. It wouldnt be a bad idea to take 2nd position behind them and let them pay an inflated click price and deplete their limited budget in the meantime. Your probably not going to sacrifice that many clicks.

[KGirl]

Hey JMEZ or should I say Overture. The process is still WRONG. No one should have to bid against an advertiser that isn't even active. The only real winner here is Overture. Let me paint you a real live picture. 6th place - .50, 5th place (ghost bid of 1.60), 4th place - 1.61, 3rd place - 1.62, 2nd place - 1.63 and 1st place 1.64. We all know that if the ghost bid was not there to compete against, that no one would be bidding 1.10 above the 6th place bid. Especially when you know that you are going to receive in the neighborhood of 500 clicks that day! So who wins? Overture. For every click from 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th place Overture is reaping an additional 1.10 or more per click. Let's say 1st place gets 500 clicks, 2nd place gets 400 clicks, 3rd place gets 300 clicks, and 4th place gets 200 clicks. That's an extra $1500.00 in Overture's pockets in one day from just one key word! Now multiply that out times how many key words Overture deals with and the numbers are staggering. Overture tells you that they don't tell you what to bid. Ha ha ha then why do they offer us the bid tool to compare? Everyone wants to be in the highest position they can...that's human nature, and that's what they are BANKING on! Oh, and JMEZ if your not really Overture...who you going to believe, your Overture partner that is party to all this un-ethical activity or your bank account? The ground is rumbling.

[iDKris]

wow, i haven't been reading the boards lately and i didn't even consider this. i've noticed some of my highest volume and expensive keywords have these issues.

yes it would take $$$$ to take legal action. but if you can prove how much $$$$ ov's actions are costing you, it might be worth it in the long run. i'm definitely going to start keeping track of this and going to consider running this by one of our lawyers.

[4crests]

if what JMEZ says is correct, then I have to agree that it's no big deal.

But, if you pay a penny more than the ghost bid even when their budget causes them not to show up, then yes, that would be wrong.

So, do we have a definitive answer on this?

I have been curious about this for a while now.

[Wlauzon]

"Yes Wlauzon,
You are correct. You could use this ghost bidding as a weapon. If you make a high bid and low budget, you could fool your competitors into bidding above that and they WILL be charged a penny above the ghost bid..."

Hmm that is interesting.. It also explains a few things.

There are a few keywords we use that have 2-3 very high bids, so we just bid in for like 5th place, yet from the reports I see that our average position is around 2.3 or so, and we get a fair amount of clicks from them. For one key phrase we are supposedly #9, yet our average position shows as 4.5.

It appears that this is more common than I suspected...

I will have to try something just for grins, and set about 30 KW to a very low bid and see how many times it actually shows up and how many clicks. If I still get a fair amount of clicks at say .12 when the high bid is $2, then there is something fishy...

[Jmez]

Wow KGIRL I just finally read your rebuttle and would have to say I am shocked.
Im sorry to hear about your obvious frustrations but unfortunately its coming from a lack of understanding by yourself and your competitors. If you would read into my last post a little further you would see that I suggested bidding behind these ghost bidders for numerous reasons.

I agree that Overture is benefiting from this but only if you let them by outbidding the ghost bidder. Even if you decide to outbid them it is not that considerable. Also your theory about Overture profiting from hundreds of inflated clicks make me wonder if even if you read my above post.

Let me refresh you a little about my last post. You only pay $0.01 more than the ghost bidder if he shows up in the search results. You should notice that the ghost bidder hardly ever shows up at all hence the name "Ghost Bidder." So only the very limited number of times the Ghost Bidder shows up in the search results do you pay $0.01 above his inflated bid.

Your theory was "For every click from 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th place Overture is reaping an additional 1.10 or more per click. Let's say 1st place gets 500 clicks, 2nd place gets 400 clicks, 3rd place gets 300 clicks, and 4th place gets 200 clicks. That's an extra $1500.00 in Overture's pockets in one day from just one key word! Now multiply that out times how many key words Overture deals with and the numbers are staggering."

So in theory if yourself and your competitors were smart you wouldn't bother outbidding him and allow him to catch a few random inflated clicks and let him run his limited budget dry. Instead everyone got territorial and outbid him thus making your extra $1,500 a day theory correct.

You can argue it 2 ways. If these ghost bidders were not allowed then you would never be in this mess or like every other day in the online marketplace you need to adapt to these changes.

WLAUZON seems as if he is playing his cards right. You might be use to bidding in 1st but you need to be disciplined enought to bid in second or third behind the ghost bidders knowing you are still receiving that 1st place traffic.

[KGirl]

We have been conducting a few experiments to determine the truth on this matter. Overture has told us that when the ghost bidder is not online, we are paying a penny above the bidder directly below the ghost bidder (even though on bid tools "our cost" still shows at a penny above the ghost bidder. Overture told us that the bid tool "our cost" is wrong. We wanted to see if this was true, so this is what we did:

We lowered our bidding position (normally we need 1st or 2nd place to get any business) We bid one penny above the ghost bidder for one day. The Ghost bidder was in 5th place and we were in 4th place. The ghost bidder was almost a dollar above the bid directly below it:

#1 Bid = $1.75
#2 Bid = $1.74
#3 Bid = $1.73
#4 Bid = $1.72 (our position)
#5 Bid = $1.71 (Ghost bidder)
#5 Bid = $0.60

We knew if what overture said was true, our average cost per click for this day would be close to 60 cents as long as the bidding didn't change much--and especially since we believe our ghost bidder only get 15 minutes a day online. If Overture wasn't telling the truth, then our average would be $1.72. It turns our the average ended up close to 60 cents.

STILL.... all the people above us paid over $1.71 and didn't need to pay this much. So the problem lies in the people who are above the person above the ghost bidder. I would love to sit all day in 5th place at 61 cents, but I wouldn't get much business---we've tried that already. We typically prefer to be in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place so we are currently averaging $1.72 to be in those positions because our competitors don't understand the ghost bidding issue. Frankly, I don't want to tell them about it either because they are the type of competitors to use this as a weapon to drain our budget even more. I might have been wrong about paying a penny above the ghost bid, but I AM NOT WRONG THAT GHOST BIDDERS DRIVE UP THE BIDDING. Typically the keyword we are bidding on goes for less than it is now going for. I AM NOT WRONG THAT THIS IS UNETHICAL. Overture's response is "we don't tell you what to bid". Then why do they show this ghost bidder on the bid tools and make us all think he is active?

[bostonseo]

Overture has their best interests in mind. I'm sure the SEC and other federal/state regulatory agencies are receiving volumes of complaints regarding issues with Overture.

[KGirl]

JMEZ your continuing understanding and apparent support of the whole ghost bidding thing further supports my theory that you are nothing but an Overture advocate sent to this message board by your bosses to try to dispell any outlandish ideas that mother Overture could be promoting any unethical bidding activity amongst advertisors on her search engine! WOW! I don't have the kind of relationship with each of my competitors as you suggest there should be. Even if I did, what am I supposed to do? Call them up and say hey! here's another way for you to rip off my bank account (like click fraud doen't already take enough!) JMEZ get a clue the ONLY right thing to do would be for Overture to remove the Ghost bidder from the bid tool when they are not active. You know that, I know that...just about everybody that is reading this posting knows that. It's out and out deception. So quit supporting Overture's actions and help us by suggesting something that will eliminate the problem for good.

[KGirl]

Oh by the way...Overture's operation is based each and every advertisor being territorial, if they weren't everone would be bidding .10 now wouldn't they. So abviuosly you are not going to get every advertisor across the board to quit being territorial.

[Bidman]

Not to take any sides KGIRL but I have heard a lot of supporting data from JMEZ that has been very useful for me in understanding the issue at hand.

This forum exist for the purpose of helping fellow Web Professionals and not for finger pointing. As only a less than a week member you have a lot to learn.

Also if you took the time to check out some of JMEZ's other threads it wouldnt be hard to figure out that he or she doesnt work for Overture.

[KGirl]

Say what you will, but this is a fact:
I am paying 75 cents to 1.00 more than I need to right now to be in one of the top 3 positions. I cannot call all my competitors and explain this design Flaw in Overture's system and ask them to all get together and bid below the Ghost. Overture needs to get rid of the ghost so my competitors come down in bidding. '

Also, I don't have time to check all 300 keywords I bid on and reseach who else are ghost bidders. If the bidder isn't online, they shouldn't be showing up as a bidder on the bid tools!

Doesn't anyone else get this? I'm not the bad guy (girl) here!

[scout]

I think the main issue here is that if you manage thousands of keywords, checking them all for potential ghost bids is a time consuming hassle that none of us want to go through.

I also see the potential here for ghost bids to eventually become grossly abused by PPC players solely in order to drive up costs for everyone. This could be a real problem if someone is bidding two sites on the same keyword in order to jam competitors, but that never happens, does it. :)

An easy fix for Overture to make would be to highlight (blue, bold, underline, whatever) bids in the Overture interface for keywords where there is a daily budget set. At least then we could easily identify these ghost bids without having to go out and constantly search them.

Also, I'm sensing a somewhat antagonist attraction developing between Kgirl and Jmez. I wonder if there are any stickies?

[KGirl]

Hey Scout thanks for your ideas. You get it! What's a stickie anyway, I guess I'd like to know if I am one! Wouldn't it be even greater if the Ghost bid didn't show up at all. Have you ever run out of money before depositing more into your account? I have and Overture didn't let my bid stay on the bid tool. What's the difference?