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While this is true to some degree, I can also tell you that I have tracked buyers from free results, and I get at least 5% sales on the clicks, but near 0% on the same keywords on Overture.
I see that the top 2 listings on Overture are always the same companies. I can tell you that there is NO WAY they could be making money, yet they remain in these positions. If theier experience is anything even close to mine, they are spending $10,000 to make $500.
Something just isn't right with this picture.
AND ... I personally am seeing this picture repeated for another industry as well. The only think I can figure out is...
1) These companies are making a huge sacrifice to keep other companies out of the top 3
2) These companies have developed a procedure for clicking on ads and not getting caught.
What can I do? HELP!
I haven't used Overture yet, but am getting good results from Adwords...
But like the O. rep said, it would be best at this point to focus on other keywords if these are a loss.
So you're saying you asked them to look into possible fraud and they gave you a canned answer?
I know a guy who stopped his competitor from clicking on his ads every day. He looked up the IP address and it was from an ISP in his local town. So, thinking it might be a competitor down the street, he set up a script on his server to redirect visitors from that IP to a certain web page that simply said, "Hey Fred! Stop Clicking On My Ads!"
The next day the extra clicks stopped and there haven't been any since.
That's really funny about the redirect. For a small number of competators that would be too much fun calling people out, but for a larger group it would be tougher.
Then again, if the clicks increased you could immediately rule that person out, and change the name to your next suspect.
not necessarily.
if the traffic is coming from a particular IP address or set of IPs? If you can identify some of them you can block them
I don't understand this? If you 'block' an IP address from coming to your website - that's not going to stop that IP address clicking on your advertisements on Overture's partner sites (Yahoo! / MSN etc).
So the blocked IP guy could still happily click on your advert on Yahoo!/ MSN or whatever website - the click instigates the charge - they'd just never actually 'get' to your website (because you blocked them by IP).
Wouldn't the click still be charged?
Am I missing something?
More competitive (Broader) keywords will almost always convert at a lower percentage than more specific terms. This is "nothing" new in the search game (paid or otherwise)..
Someone who searches for cars, versus someone who searches for honda cars, is a no brainer..
But, many advertisers are using paid search for branding, or a combination of branding/sales. Customer acquisition doesn't necessarily occur on the first visit.
We always consult to an advertiser to "not ignore" the very broad terms. If their product/service offering is much more specific than the broad term, tailor their T&D to try and filter the sector of the broad search audience that is not targeted by their offering.
Many advertisers are expending a large sum of their budget on broad terms in paid search, across many vertical markets. I can guarantee you they are experiencing positive ROI. The days of blindly throwing money at paid search, are long over.
dvduval,
Grab your log evidence, and get w/ an Overture rep to look into the situation. Nobody cares more about click fraud than Overture.
By the way, I've had more advertisers ask about click fraud on GAW than Overture in recent months.
Thank goodness I'm not losing my mind!
JH
which one
/asbjoern
Many advertisers are expending a large sum of their budget on broad terms in paid search, across many vertical markets. I can guarantee you they are experiencing positive ROI. The days of blindly throwing money at paid search, are long over.
That depends on the product though, and what they keyword is for a broad search.
For example, we sell solar electric systems. The keyword "solar" would be totally worthless to us, because it also brings up things like astronomy and tons of other unrelated terms.
We sell Acme Widgets. We also sell 5 other brands of widgets, so "widgets" might be a valid broad term, but when we tried it we got a huge number of clicks, and no ROI. The reason, as we figured out, was because the vast majority of searches for "widgets" was for things like "free", "make your own", "widget schematics" etc etc, plus the other 34 brands of widgets that we do not sell.
So, we refined it somewhat - we use a lot of negative keywords, like "free", "home made", "home built" etc.
Keywords are going to vary a lot by industry, type of item sold, and what type business you are in. General Electric is going to look at the keyword "refrigerator" a lot different than I do.
We are in a very small niche industry, and there are a limited number of useful keywords.
