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I had several sites under one account with overtures PPC and when I received a notice stating " you have exhausted the funds in your Overture account" I began to investigate this growing problem because now, all of my sites are not listed any longer, I have spent all my money and I still didn't receive any sales from all of this "so called traffic" overture said I was getting.
My findings were totally shocking when I tried to generate reports, which were 3 weeks old, the reports had data not relevent to how much I spent on the amount of clicks I received.
Another mind twister they throw at you is the fact when
your money runs out, shutting down your account, they get rid of the number of hits you "so called received". So, when my account runs out of money and my sites are taken off the listings, I cannot find how all this money I just spent was actually exhausted. This happened so fast with so little evidence of why!?
I went a few steps further into my investigation and found through my web logs that the amount of traffic I was getting to my sites didn't match up to the "so called clicks" I received according to overture.
So who's telling the truth here? Is there a glich in my web logs or is overture hiding the real true way they take your money and providing an automatic click through?
My sales conversion clearly says so. I received all this massive traffic and not one sale. Our sites are designed and optimized to sell our services and while using other means of traffic, clearly justifies my findings.
Just like any ad campaign on the web and you can't tell whether it drove anyone to your site, is it still an ad campaign? How do we know whether the customers had clicked on the URL's in our paid listing when we cannot find out how, when or where?
I use web Analytics as the process of measuring and analyzing the effectiveness of my e-business websites in terms of customer experience, return on investment, and site effectiveness. Now, my website collects massive amounts of site visitors and usage data, but how do I analyze the data to provide a better customer experience and determine ROI if overture doesn't provide any kind of current or updated information?
Overture, you need a major overhaul and you just lost a valued customer. My search results will rely heavily from now on with another PPC....Wake up!
[edited by: engine at 5:04 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2005]
[edit reason] formatting & TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
Just because an Overture account balance goes to zero, your stats are still accessible. Do you click the "Reports" tab in DTC? There is a myriad of various reports you can pull. I suggest that you run the "Search Activity Detail" report.
If you are using web analytics for your PPC campaigns, you should already know where the money went.... :)
Were you using Overture's dynamic tracking parameters so your web analytics could track which keywords were generating clicks, and tracking bounce rate, and visitor segmentation analytics within your site? Were you using pro-active bid management, to insure you received the most visitors per spend?
There are many components to running a successful paid search campaign. Leave one out of the equation, and you will be hard pressed to maximize profitability.
While some vertical markets do better in Google AdWords, some do better in Overture. Both have proven over the last few years to provide better ROAS (Return on Adspend), than the majority of other paid search alternatives.
You just said the magic words, "Content Match".. :)
I strongly advise when starting a new paid search campaign in both Overture or GAW, to only use Precision Match (Over)/Search Network (GAW)..
This insures that your ad listings are displayed on the major portals (For the most part), only, and not 3rd party independent web site partners.
Then if the Precision Match campaign is profitable, and you want to test the waters w/ Content Match. Start the bids at minimum, and monitor closely.
I agree. The problem I did encounter was jumping into higher content matching at the start and not looking at the consequences of overbidding.
I do appreciate your time in helping me understand this.
[edited by: engine at 10:29 am (utc) on Jan. 21, 2005]
[edit reason] formatting [/edit]
