Managing Overture keywords

Should I hire someone to manage Overture keywords?

[informationjunky]

I work for a medium-sized ecommerce company with several thousand keywords on Overture, and I'm trying to determine whether we should hire someone just to manage our Overture listings, since we spend over a million dollars a month with them (currently I manage Overture myself along with several other search deals, so I'm stretched pretty thin).

I've been managing the listings so far by just bidding them all up to the #1 spot every half hour (since I don't have the resources to manage them on an individual keyword basis). Obviously, this means we're overpaying on many words - so my question for you all are as follows:

1) Do any of you have anyone at your companies whose full-time job it is to just manage the Overture listings? If so, how has that worked for you?

2) Have any of you realized significant savings by managing your keywords on an invidual basis (i.e. just paying more attention to them then you did previously)?

Just trying to figure out what the cost savings would be to hire someone to do this and whether it's worth it.

All advice is very much appreciated! Thanks!

[Shakil]

a Million $$$?

somehow I do not think this is true :)

Shak

[jatar_k]

taking the dollar amts into account.

Seems simple, If you are overspending by 1%, which is likely, you can save 120K/yr just by having someone manage it. You also will not be paying this person 120K so you will save money.

I find it very hard to believe though that a mid size company would spend 12 million a yr on overture. Just seems fairly wasteful.

We have had someone doing this and
1. It has worked very well but it is a pretty boring job and motivation is an issue

2. It has helped us streamline our spending

[informationjunky]

Maybe I misspoke when I called us "mid-size," I guess we're actually a pretty big company; just doesn't seem that way since our Marketing team is fairly small. I promise we do spend a million a month, though, (actually a little over that) and it performs very well for us (we track all the way through to purchase amount by keyword). I know it seems hard to believe, but I'm not shucking you, I promise. :)

I only mention the amount to explain why I'm thinking of hiring someone to manage the account.

Jatar_k, how did you recruit for this position? I mean, is it possible to find people who've done this before? Just managed Overture listings, I mean.

Thanks everyone for you input!

[jatar_k]

You just hire someone who isn't a moron and knows how to manage money. I am not a huge fan of doing the actual overture management, it's boring, all you do is watch terms look at #'s of clicks against cost against budget against traffic. It's more like accounting than anything else.

Just find someone and train them. With thousands of terms though, I would find someone you can depend on and has no small amount of commitment. Sounds monstrously frustrating.

>>I guess we're actually a pretty big company

makes a little more sense.

[pageoneresults]

There are plenty of third party tools that you can purchase to assist in managing your campaign. Overture just increased the limit of queries to 24 per day via an XML feed so you are able to stay on top of the competition. You just need to make sure that someone educates you on the use of the program that you choose and how to effectively surf the gaps and capitalize on those.

ij, check your sticky mail up top, it reads [inbox:1 - unread:0]

[Mike_Mackin]

informationjunky:

With that spend rate it would seem that you could DEMAND that Overture give you 3 full time reps to deal with your account 24x7.

Insist they are not rejected editor morons but employees that understand a clients needs while insuring suffer satisfaction.

[usa based comment & mho]

[informationjunky]

We actually do have an account manager at Overture who bids our keywords back up to the top 3 spots every half hour - but frequently he falls behind and I find we're way down on the list, which negatively effects our volume of clicks/transactions.

I think the point about saving 1% pays for this person's salary is a good one, and probably the case I'll make to my manager. (And yes, it is difficult and frustrating to monitor so many keywords at once).

I agree re: using some kind of bid management software. Does anyone have any recommendations as to which one is the best? (There may be a thread on here about that, but I haven't been able to find it.)

[Weblamer]

I think it’s a rather poor marketing department you have if you have a million bucks to spend a month and your entire marketing team cannot come up with a way to manage overture keywords.

I am the one man e-commerce department at my company. When I first started using overture I had a few thousand little used but relevant keywords I wanted for my campaign. Rather that have to pay the 99 dollar fee (and whatever use they would try to charge me with) for a rep to enter these keywords, I instead stuffed them into an access database and wrote a visual basic front end. The visual basic program (using the nifty sendkeys command) would connect to the ‘add keywords’ section of the overture website
And rolled through the database, inputting the keywords, a custom title with the keyword in it, and a description with the keyword in it. I sat and sipped a coke for an hour or two as my little VB app dumped a few thousand keywords into overture.

Now that the keywords are up and running, I wrote another app that connects to the reports section of the overture website, and downloads the reports in a csv format. The app then dumps it into an access database, and then filters through the data to generate whatever reports I feel are relevant at the time. The only steps I had to perform is typing in the graphic-access code at the overture login page.

Maybe you should convince your company to hire a developer to work with your marketing department?

[jerseyfreeze]

informationjunky,

I currently manage our Overture (and just about every other PPC SE) account. We spend over $30,000 a month, and I'm looking for another job.

Interested? Send me an email: AT the address in my profile.
Thanks.

Jason

[edited by: Mike_Mackin at 4:17 pm (utc) on July 3, 2002]