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I’d opened a new account in January, my eleventh with Overture and, allegedly, I’d set my daily budget to $310.00. In addition I’d accepted the maximum bid (i.e. the #1 spot) for all my new keywords which meant more than $6 a click in some cases. Finally, I’d signed up for auto-billing so that Overture could debit more money from my card as soon as the account ran dry which, at $6 a throw, wasn’t taking very long.
Frankly, I don’t believe them. It is possible that the auto-billing feature is the default, hidden deep in the terms and conditions and I overlooked it. But the daily budget of $310.00 – its just too random and at least ten times anything I would have wanted. And did I really accept the maximum bid levels for all the search terms? I don’t think so.
The point is, I suspect that Overture must have had a software malfunction (that’s my generous explanation) and that this bug set my advertising budget at Sky-High levels. What I need to know is whether this has happened to anyone else because, naturally, that would make my case much stronger.
Overture have, to date, offered me a $25 ‘goodwill’ refund.
You have to keep your peepers peeled for that kind of thing now on Overture, especially the bids. When you first start an account, the bids are all the #1 position. I make a point in every account I open to check every single bid. It takes a bit longer, but its safer.
Also, I always have to call or send a support ticket when I want to change the billing to a pre-pay or fixed budget plan. Overture likes to be tricky.
We have gotten so that we always go for 2nd place, and never never use autobid or auto billing or auto anything. They have screwed up too many times for us to have much faith in them.
Just for the record, there is some evidence that first place is not the best spot to be, something to do with the way people look at pages they tend to "not see" anything in that spot. I have seen few real good studies on this, so don't take this as a given rule.
I'm not certain if they do it on purpose, or if it is poor usability, but it is sometimes very confusing to work with their budgeting feature. I like the old pay as you go plan, and they make that virtually impossible to do.
I phoned them up and told them I will do a charge back on the transaction and close my account if I cant go back to adding money when I want to........after 5 mins of hanging on the phone the nice lady came back and told my account would be reverted back to the previous plan...........ring them up!
Karl :)
You set your bids to automatically jump to #1, then you set it to autobill when it runs low (not run dry as you state), and you're upset because it burned through $310 (sixty clicks) and replenished? So... uh.. um. Can you explain again what Overture did wrong?
No offense intended, but letting all your bids float to #1 automatically doesn't sound like the best way to manage a PPC campaign. That's a pretty hands off way to manage one's money. Perhaps I'm missing something, but "set it and forget it" might be good for roasting chickens but this is money we're talking about...
The lady at Overture told me I had set everything to #1 spot by which I took it to mean that I had literally selected #1 for each term. But now I see that's not how it works at all. Overture defaults your bid to the one cent above the highest bid.
It sounds like it comes to the same thing but its not quite. It means that I would have seen the actual bids I would have been making for each term (rather than numbers 1-5) and accepted them and that wouldn't have been what I wanted.
That's not legal proof of anything I realise. I sell hotel accommodation and I constantly have customers saying 'I booked a twin room but you've confirmed a single'. Of course that's not what happened. They had it in mind to book a twin room but they didn't change the selection to two people so they ended up with a single room. Their oversight. Their mistake. For the record, even though its in our terms to do so, we'd never charge a customer to change over to their preferred room type.
But in the case of Overture, I'm no newbie. I've got ten accounts. And what I'm wondering is whether I really selected the options they say I did or whether their system didn't accept my options. If that sounds farfetched read some of the threads here [webmasterworld.com] where Overture have accepted that their software hasn't worked at certain points and maximum daily bid levels, for example, have been totally ignored.
