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We have always used the plan where we refill the account ourselves, because we get so screwed by the method they use to refill the account.
The problem for us is that the area we advertise in is so agressive, that without any budgeting tool, you can often be gone before lunch. So, needless to say, we were thrilled that they they finally going to offer some type of budgeting feature. (Athough it's still tied to their lame recurring billing feature).
I set it up a couple days ago. Today, I get an email fro Google letting me know that the received a decline when they tried to charge our card. Turns out, Overture had allowed our daily click charges to run almost 3 times the amount we specified in our budget. That in turn caused the credit card to reach an all-time high for a given month, so the credit card company disabled the account.
Now we have no ads running on Google. And Overture has a big chunk of our cash in their account because their auto charge system just keeps hitting the card over and over.
Now you might think that Overture might take a few minutes out of their day to get on the phone to notify at least their big dollar customers who selected the budgeting feature that it doesn't actually work. Did that happen? Not that I can tell. The only thing I got was their usual canned crap email letting me know the great news about all the traffic they've sent.
I wonder how long it will take them to figure out the a simple phone call actually takes less time than going through the process of crediting back all the maoney in our account so that we can move that balance, as well as our additional 250k+ budget to our Google account?
Today overture charged 3 times the amount i specified in their bugeting tool. I changed the CC details to prevent further charges and suspended the account.
I wonder if there is a way I can do a charge back?
I think what's happening this month is that its a monthly budget - not a daily one.
Since this went into effect in the middle of the month, what's happening is people who are spending $100 a day, are actually spending $200 because the month is half over and you're not coming close to your monthly budget.
I've got a couple account reps looking into the problems - but no official word on whats going on yet.
So if you have a budget of $100 a day, and run the campaign for 20 days, you should be in the neighborhood of $2000 spent. However, if you now change the budget to $500 a day, Overture has 7 days to charge you $3500 as your monthly budget has started over for the month.
According to my OV reps, here's what's going on with many accounts. It's a monthly budget, however, if you change the budget during the month - the numbers are reset.
So if you have a budget of $100 a day, and run the campaign for 20 days, you should be in the neighborhood of $2000 spent. However, if you now change the budget to $500 a day, Overture has 7 days to charge you $3500 as your monthly budget has started over for the month.
Monthly Budget from when? From 1st of the month or the day on which you start an account with the Overture.
Suppose I start with $100 a day as monthly budget and after running for 20 days (which means I am in the neighbourhood of $2000) I decide to change my budget to $500. So the numbers are reset. So does that mean, Overture will start thinking that I have spend $0.00 until now (cause the numbers are reset) and it has remaining 7 to 10 days to charge me around about (500 * 30 = $15000) $15000.
Please correct me if I am wrong. I am new to Overture and your comments will be appreciated.
It's now suppose to be a 30 day cycle from the moment you change your budget. Let's hope it start to work - it'll be nice if it actually does.
When you load that page now, you see this:
To enable the budgeting feature, you must first select "Budget On" below. You may then enter a daily budget for your entire account.
You then come to a form that has a box for you to input your daily budget. Once you put a number in, the next box over is updated with a dollar amount that is labeled approximate monthly budget.
You are then provided a box that allows you to adjust the dollar amount you need to hit before your card is recharged. The default amount if the approximate monthly budget, but you can set an amount lower if you want.
Based on that, I don't think it's unreasonable for an advertiser to draw the conclusion that they are infact controlling how much they are spending in a single day.
In my case, I went to the budgeting form and put $1500.00 in the daily budget box. That produced an approximate monthly budget of $45,000. Now this particular account is one that is sporadic, so we may not need to spend that much for the entire month. So I edited the the amount that triggers the re-charging of the account to $6000.00
I logged out of the DTC believing that the maximum I was going to spend in a given day was $1500.00 and that the account would be replenished approximately every 4 days.
But that isn't what really happened. I ended up getting hit for close to $7000.00 the first day.
In order to find out how it really works, you need to look at the well hidden help file:
The budgeting feature provides you with maximum financial control by allowing you to limit the amount your account is charged every month.
Interesting how the word daily is completely missing.
What needs to happen is the language on the signup page and the form need to be reversed. The initial input field should be changed to monthly budget and the results that show up to the right should be labeled approximate daily budget.
The signup page should also make it very clear that the budgeting tool in no way provides you the ability to control your spend on a daily basis.
Then, once that's done, they should take some time to explain to all their customers why they continually refuse to provide them with any tools that actually give them real control.
