Adwords redirection

Who is paying for the click?

[George]

so here is how it goes:
Got an issue with someone who is advertising against my clients site on adwords.
Well, this time more than normal. :)

Seems that he is advertising for "name" and so comes up on "Company Name".
If you then click on his/her advert, you go get one of three results. It seems they have set up 3 adverts in adwords, (which naturally rotate) and 3 different web sites can be shown.
On closer inspection with dear Sammmy Spade, it seems this page then redirects to:
Connection: close

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved
<link removed>

Where variable domain.com is one of the three domains bidding on Overture for this phrase.

so to recap, we go from:

1 www.google.com to
2 www.advertiserssite.tld to
3 www.overture.com to
4 www.variabledomain.tld(my site in 1/3 of instances)

I am waiting for Overture to confirm I am paying for clicks from Google.
But nothing yet from Google.
Anyone any experience of this?

My clients getting hot under the collar, sending me his lawyers telephone number, but before I do that, I want to be clear of the whys and hows.

I assume "name" is cheaper on Google than overture. ....But who gets paid :)

[edited by: eWhisper at 3:39 pm (utc) on May 25, 2005]
[edit reason] Read Using Sample Links [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[BigAl]

That's a brain teaser. Not sure! You lost me when you said the site gets redirected to overture. Why would the site be redirected to overture. Makes no scence...

[delizia]

Oooh so this guy is getting paid for an Overture ad triggered automatically by a Google search - and if they pay less from Google than they get from Overture, they made money?

This is evil genius!

[delizia]

I meant "And if they pay less to Google...

[eWhisper]

This is often known as arbitrage [google.com]

Sometimes, it's referred to as adsense arbitrage [google.com] or overture arbitrage (if you have an OV feed).

You'll often see this with citysearch bidding on AdWords to drive traffic to citysearch advertisers, or IYPs who run adwords/ov feeds.

There is one instance where this is a benefit to you:
If you're a local advertiser, so just can't bid on some national terms as they're too irrelevant, someone else can bid on the national if they have links for all the local sites, so you end up getting some relevant hits for which you could never get exposure.