Budget - Problems

Budget - Problems with spread of ads

[dregs33]

Hi

Below are my stats from the last few days, when I set a budget I accept there will good days and bad days but this is crazy. For three out of the last four days I've had no ads showing. Its not like Google where they will compensate you for over delivery. There attitude is , well you got the delivery whats the problem.

I have rebased these figures to 1

Dec 09 2004 1.5
Dec 10 2004 0.5
Dec 11 2004 1
Dec 12 2004 0
Dec 13 2004 4.5
Dec 14 2004 0
Dec 15 2004 0

Can someone at Overture please get some programmers that know what they are doing.

dregs33

PS. I see the offical Overture poster has disappeared, will anyone from Overture every respond to the posters in this forum. :(

[OvertureRep]

Hi dregs33,

It sounds like you might be experiencing some bumps with our budget "smoothing" feature. We shoot for reaching a 30-day monthly budget by smoothing our delivery of traffic across the days based on that desired budget. This usually works pretty well, but sometimes we’ll see more daily fluctuations depending on the budget amount and the volume of traffic available to the account.

If you like, I’d be happy to send your feedback on to one of our senior engineers so we can look further into your stats. Just sticky mail me with your account info, and I’ll make sure it gets to the right person.

Thanks for the heads-up and the input. We only recently launched this feature, so we’re definitely working to improve it.

OvertureRep

[eWhisper]

I think one piece of info that definitely needs passed to the engineers is how Overture calculates daily budgets.

According to our reps, Overture calculates daily budgets on a monthly calendar basis. Therefore, when you change your daily budget, the monetary amount isn't being calculated on a 30day average, but on how much time is in the month left to hit that budget.

It seems that Overture continues to use the calendar because there is a minimum spend threshold.

Daily budgets should be calculated on 30day averages, and the spend evened out throughout the entire period, and Overture should ignore the fact that the calendar even exists for calculating out these budgets.

[cgrantski]

That is absolutely true. We are accountable to our clients and this kind of fluctuation is unacceptable to them. In fact, this fluctuation is FAR MORE fluctuation that we get if we are just manually watching the spend rates or, for that matter, not watching them at all.

Please, Overture, your smoothing algorithm is terrible. The experience described above is what we see also. We have weekly budgets to stay within and we had to turn it off.

[sem4u]

I do hope that the Overture smoothing feature for budgets is working now.

On a new account I am getting this for the last couple of days:

16 Feb - 13% over
17 Feb - 58% over!
18 Feb - 28% over
(intra-day)

Ideally I want to budget spread throughout the month like at Google.

[dregs33]

Hi

I no longer use Overture, for proper advertising, as their budget system simply doesn't work.

So I set the daily budget to £1.00, and stop after I have reached the monthly min spend of £20, so to keep my account active.

So I get an email a few minutes ago, saying they have charged my card. What I think, how come. So I login.

Mar 1st - Spend £13 - Budget - £1
Mar 2nd - Spend £7 - Budget - £1

If this was Google they would compensate me for the overclicks, with Overture they say "You'll be happy to hear that your site has received a significant amount of targeted clickthrough traffic from us!"

The incomptence of Overture knows now bounds.

Dregs33

[sem4u]

Well that is just stupid!

I have a feeling that my card is about to be charged again...