Overture, the real story?

[tb2135]

I have used overture on and off for over 1 year. I have never, and I mean NEVER had good conversion on overture. (Except a few examples).

I don't feel that overture handles fraudulent clicks as well as other PPC's.

I have had ads with 1,000's of clicks and no sale. In my logs, I have seen that 75% of these clicks are 3 ip addresses.

If you shoot for the top 3, beware. Competitors will click your ads over and over etc. (usually to force you to use your ad budget).

Now, this is just one side. I want people to post their success stories with overture! Tell us if you have success. Is it with not the top 3 positions? Is there not much competition?

[hobbnet]

I advertise many sites in overture. The single term I spend the most on (about $550 per day) converts on about 6% of the clicks it receives. Also, this term is searched for about 300,000 times per month according to the search suggestion tool.

I have many other examples of well performing campaigns on overture but this is probably the best.

[webdiversity]

In many industries Overture are the providers that always deliver best ROI, and usually the keywords are very competitive.

I suspect that the difference between a cryptic T & D (25 title 70 description) on Google does not lend itself as strongly in terms of call to action sales message opportunity as Overture's 40/190.

What you see in your logs would not be click fraud. Those sorts of patterns are a "slam dunk" for any PPC provider to identify. Many publishers have optimised their sites for traffic for one specific keyword, you can opt to receive that traffic, or if it fails to deliver ROI then you can opt out, but I'd say you can't blame Overture or any other PPC provider for that one.

I know plenty of people that have had thousands of rides in a car and no accidents, but it doesn't make them a good driver.

[tb2135]

Great points. So are you basically saying maybe I was using to broad of keywords?

For example, if I sell widget1, would overture work better if i used:

buy widget1
order widget1
widget1 cheap

as apposed to just using widget1 as a keyword?

Also, I see what you mean about overture's ads. Maybe I need to spend more time on the ad itself.

Thanks.

[JuniorOptimizer]

Is there a way to get rid of the third tier "search engines" and expired domain pages in Overture?