Has anything changed in Overture recently?

[hibuddy]

Hi
I am new to this forum. But I have read the posts several times.I felt this is pretty useful forum.

Anyway I have doing good with overture last couple of month until last Thrusday things were good(May 4 2005).then my profitable keywords starts gets less traffic almost less than 1/4 of what I use to get.Eventhough I get the some clicks ROI is not really good. I checked the position .It is not changed and I did not change much in my site too.Do you any guess what else could be the problem.

Is there anything changed in overture other than its name.

Thanks in advance.

[bostonseo]

I have seen less clicks from Yahoo too. As you know, MSN has cut way back on their distribution with Yahoo. Sure yes they still serve the ads, but on the majority of the good terms MSN has sold fixed CPC deals directly to advertisers on spots #1-3. So If you have the #1 position on Overture(Yahoo) you really are only #4 on MSN (again for keywords that MSN has sold directly to Advertisers...but they've sold the majority of terms >$1). So traffic from MSN via Overture is down dramatically for most advertisers.

That just one reason.

[hibuddy]

Thanks a lot for you reply. Does it means let us say my postion is number 7 . Do I need to change it to 3 which could bring the same number of traffic which I was getting earlier ( May be more becuase my postion is changing in Overture from 7 to 3). Do you know when this change happened.

[kona]

According to this thread here
[webmasterworld.com...]
this has been the case with MSN for a long time. Does anyone know for sure for how long MSN has been selling positions 1-3 directly to clients?

Also, is this just a US thing or does it apply to advertisers worldwide?

[bostonseo]

MSN has been doing direct deals for minimally 2 years now. They have been very aggressive in selling spots #1-3 in the last year. As I said before, there are very few keywords that are 'tops' in impressions not sold out on MSN. So again #1 in the DTC on Yahoo/Overture means usually #4 on MSN.

So with Yahoo/Overture now, you pay the same price for #4 spot on MSN as you do for #1 on Yahoo.

[johnnydequino]

Now that you mentioned this, I looked at my stats. And yes, something changed bigtime on May 4th. I thought it was seasonal, but I can see overture is playing around with some matching options on misspellings and stuff with advanced match. Not sure why overture is doing this, but I actually thought they had a winning formula before May 4th. Anyone know what is going on?

jd

[ByronM]

I bid on political terms so my account has been going nuts since the filibuster mess errupted..

Other then that, Yahoo has been the Best. I don't use adwords anymore since i don't like Google's TOS and post billing.

Pre-pay for me..