Explosion in Overture clicks

Has anyone else experienced this - HELP

[Gymonsear]

on the 4th October we had 118 clicks delivered at £7.80 total spend £919

On the 5th October we had 781 clicks delivered at £9.70 total spend £5752

No change in positions or max bid

Impressions for the campaign have ony gone from 26k - 30k a rise of 4000

CTR's have risen from 0.5% to 60% in one case but 2.9% overall. The 60% CTR keyword spent 30% of the budget

Nothing has been changed by us... nothing has changed that much in position or number of impressions delivered...

How has this happened? Has Overture err'ed?

In 4 years I have never seen a rise in CTR like this?

[Shak]

have you contacted Overture regarding this?

Shak

[Gymonsear]

Will be doing so...

but they normally have a tendancy to delay and come back with excuses or denials

hoping someone could give me specific ammunition here

[pageoneresults]

Overture made some major changes over the weekend. Could that account for it?

Unlike the Phrase and Broad match types, Advanced Match is not bid upon separately from Standard Match. Instead the bid setting for Standard Match is used when the Advanced Match is enabled for a particular keyword.
BidRank Upgrade Information

[Gymonsear]

Overture have voiced concern that this may have been "tampered" with?

Anyone been "tampered" with?

pls.. do not take that the wrong way

[fiestagirl]

You should check your campaigns carefully. Since the last update I found that "tracking urls" had been mysteriously turned on.
Also if you have content match turned on and had bidding lower on those they have been "Automatically" made the same as your other bids.
Broad match has now been put in place. You may find that you need to go in and choose some negative keywords for those terms.

[Gymonsear]

Fair point...

But that doesn't explain the enormous rise on CTR

I would have understood a large increase in impressions with advanced match, leading to a higher number of clicks but a 16% rise in imps shouldn't lead to a 500% increase in CTR

The client hasn't offered FREE WIDGETS

[notawebmaster]

Had a similar event occur to us: huge jump in clicks with out changing our position and no noticeable increase in conversions. Contacted overture, their response was “only bid what you can afford to spend”.

Our spending is now focused mostly on adwords…

[beren]

We had a huge increase one day last month, and when we contacted Overture, they of course hemmed and hawed. Then it turned out that our keyword had been featured on MSN's home page that day as a "suggested search". There are 5 suggested searches every day, and we were unfortunate enough to be one of them. Overture said they had told MSN not to put any terms on suggested search that were over $1/click. Anyhow, Overture refunded our money.