Turned Overture Ads Off Today

High Cost and no ROI

[johnw1234]

A while back I posted a note that Overture went from being profitable for 5 years to producing losses in mid October. Since then I continued to pay hoping something would change once the New Year came around.

Well, nothing has changed. Thousands of paid visitors have bought practically nothing on several different domains. The same domains that produced profitable sales on the same keywords in Google during the past 90 days.

I have no idea what they did but they're out $270,000 this year. A word of advice to anyone advertising there... track everything with your own software and expect the same results from Findwhat. Lots of clicks and no sales.

[keywordguru]

I would have to agree with the part that independent tracking is a must!

I am still doing very well on Overture AND Adwords, so I can't agree fully. I can say that I have seen drastic ups and downs though. Some months are much better than others, for no apparent reason.

I would say that you might need to re evaluate the markets you are using, and the keywords you target. Don't forget that Overture made a major change to their advanced (broad) bidding structure. I have found that by only using the Standard match, my dollar goes a lot farther usually.

I find that Overture is better for some markets, while Adwords is better for others. No matter which I use, I track to the dime! If you don't, profits fly out the door.

KG

[qwik]

I am having very good results with overture.. adwords was doing really well until they changed to the new system.. now its basically worthless to me.. not worth the hassle..

I do agree concerning Findwhat though.. worthless clicks..

-qwik

[sincraft]

look I am not the best suited to respond to this topic, and maybe it is the 'conspiracy theory' buff in me, but it is MY belief, that the highest bid keywords are placed MUCH more often now in the sponsored listings than they used to be. These yields MUCH bigger profits for Overture. But like many big companies, they never see the big picture.

Have you ever done this? CHeck to see how much the first 5 bids are. Let's say the top is .65 and the 5th is .60. If you look at the guy that is paying .10, you will see the ad OCCASIONALLY when you refresh about a bazillion times on the right hand sponsored results. Meanwhile, the top three - 5 people , mostly the top three..remain in the top and bottom portion of the sponsored results.

Before it wasn't like this. I checked this out way back when, and did again just recently. ANd noticed a drastic difference. It may just be me, I may be mistaken..But I would be interested in knowing what others think of this.

Personally, I can think of about a bazillion different methods to put that $270k to use john, that will yield probably 5x's the sales that you saw at your best times with Overture. A friend of mine advertised with a well known 'shock jock' whom I think we all know who I am talking about for $25k..and he saw more sales from that in 2 weeks, than he saw in 2 years using overture.

S

[johnw1234]

It's been 11 days since I turned off my ads. My sales have remained the same. I spoke to several competitors and they're basically reporting the same thing... no sales and lots of clicks.

On a side note, I run 5 newsletters on a variety of topics and since I've turned off the Overture ads, subscription rates have remained the same. This is something I didn't expect. Logically you would think that if you cut the amount of people coming to a site, the signups for a newsletter would follow the traffic trend.... It didn't happen.

A basic example is one site I promote gets 60-65 signups for the newsletter a day. I used to send 800-1000 Overture visitors in there per day. Despite cutting these visitors out, I'm still getting 60-65 signups a day. It really makes me wonder what exactly these visitors were doing clicking my ads, not buying anything and not signing up for a freebie. While every other traffic source was buying stuff and signing up for the newsletter.

[iDKris]

the past few days i've been seeing an increase in traffic with a large decrease in sales. it's driving me nuts. ov traffic used to be extremely predictable for me but has been very shaky lately. :(

[adamxcl]

It never makes sense to me but whenever I turn off OV, my sales /traffic stay the same or shoot up. I just never see any difference from $100 a day to zero a day. (other than net profit). At this point, I have to just say I use it for branding.

[Wlauzon]

We have recently had tons of problems with our listings in Overture and dropped from around 425 to less than 20...

... but it does not seem to matter. I checked the conversion rate for the last month, and it has been miserable. And losing 98% of our listings does not seem to have affected our sales in the tiniest bit.

[johnw1234]

Hello everyone,

It's been 74 days without Overture... 2 days ago I spent $2,000 to have roughly 3,500 targeted OV leads come to my sites. I had 4 sales totaling $130. It's astounding that in the middle of the "hot" sales season, OV failed miserably.

If any OV rep is out there reading this, your traffic still SUCKS!

[lgn1]

Our Overture ads are doing fine. We are getting about 2% conversion to sales, which is our industry average.

We always bid on page 2 or page 3, never on page 1.

I find that if the customer cares enought to search deeper for results, they are better qualified.

Its better to have a lower volume of qualfied traffic rather than a high volume of lookers only.

[ByronM]

I don't think the traffic from overture sucks per say, just tougher to hit the markets you need.

Should really be able to focus on US or other geo-targeted efforts.

Also, your keywords need to be great.. not just good, but great.

Not sure how you blew through 2 grand that fast.. sounds like a bad market to begin with no matter which PPC you choose.