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But despite tons of competitor ads -- which led me to believe this would work -- our impressions and CTR were dismal. I don't think we spent more than $40/month in the 6-months I tried it.
What's worse, and what prompted me to cancel, was the awful conversion rate.. near zero. The buggy UI was no joy either, nor was the approval period our ads had to go through when modified.
But what pushed me to cancel was Overture staff repeatedly altering our ads during the approval period. I'd have a time-tested ad from AdWords, something like:
Widget Billing
The [specialty] Billing Experts
Free trial with your widgets
and Overture staff would change it to
Widget Billing
The [specialty] Billing Experts for widgets
Free trial with your widgets
I complained and they denied it. When it happened a second time I decided to throw in the towel. Needless to say, they made no inquiry into my cancellation nor did they try any retention techniques.
Weak.
I'm making a small change (different domain) for a 50,000 term campaign that's been running for 3 years. Just changing the domain name, that's all.
Oops. NONE of the ads are being accepted now, because the Description made the outrageous claim that "we will do our best for you". Clearly an inappropriate use of the superlative "best".
So we change it to "we will do a great job". And they go through. But tell me, which is more quantifiable: "do a great job" or "do our best"?
It's a simple matter of context, Yahoo. "our best" is quite different from "the best", and if your silly little brain-substitute can't tell the difference, then it's retarded. And I mean that in the nicest way.
Same applies to the "human" editors. C'mon ... THINK!
nathanso, I can't blame you for withdrawing.
it helps to write to them. i got a response and now the 'editorial team' is working on it. oh well.
i suggest - overall - best is to bug overture with complaints about slowness (loading of pages), the 'editorial processs', and yes about the cumbersome interface and time wasting report tools.
but what to do, if one wants to show in yahoo, need to post in overture.
*Accounts that are offline for the entire calendar month are not subject to the $20.00 minimum.
However, accounts that go offline at any time during
a calendar month are still subject to the $20.00 minimum monthly requirement.
These are the signs of a dying business!
My account was offline because they charged $600 to my credit cards and it took TWO WEEKS to get a refund. While the refund was being processed they stopped the ads from showing.
Now I am afraid of re-starting the account because of their cryptic, incredible confusing interfase, which does not show a clear and simple way to prevent the credit card from being charged automatically.
I mean why can't I throttle impressions anyway I want without them charging my card for 90 DAYS! worth of clicks.
I have used AdWords for years and wanted to diversify with Overture but this is not working.
Sorry for the rant but I am very disapointed.
I do remeber, where i was working for a company and that they stopped gambling ads. About $400,000 were stucked with Overture, but we finally got our money back in 6 months.
All I can say, different people need different strokes.
