Does anyone find Overture to be worth the Hassle?

Hassles seem to make Overture worthless

[BradStevens]

OK, I tried Overture about about 9 months ago and got so frustrated with ...

1) Having to have my ads approved,
2) Finding that someone from Yahoo approved some ads but altered the content of the ad (who the %$&# do they think they are, my advertising agency?),
3) The stupid, time consuming interface for adding ads,
4) The inability to regionally target my ads,

... that I inactivated the account. Yeah, every once in a while I'd get a threatning e-mail saying that if I did not reactivate the account, all my information would be lost.

So, today, nine months later, I thought I'd log in and see if any of the interface has changed for the better. Nope ... they are still stuck in stupid over at Yahoo.

I can not immagine for the life of me why they have some of the practices that they do. I spend thousands with Google's AdSense, but I just can not handle the frustration with Yahoo.

And, seeing all the talk about link fraud with Overture concerns me even more.

So, gee ... the question of "why?" comes to mind when thinking of Yahoo Overture.

What a disappointment.

[edited by: BradStevens at 10:57 pm (utc) on Mar. 13, 2006]

[ryanfromaustin]

Overture is like a high-maintenance woman. You might get some payoff for shelling out all the time, effort, and money, but the process of getting there is so painful and laborious that you constantly question why you even bother. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, you can't stop going back for more.

[powerstar]

9 months later your conversion will not be the same either... i am willing to put up with all of it if they convert but i find it extremely difficult to make money with yahoo anymore. As long as they keep those "affiliate search partners" you are facing tough to convert traffic, i think...

[LifeinAsia]

We've been using them since way back in the days they were GoTo.com (ooh- that's dating myself!). About 1/2 of the ads we have are grandfathered, so cost us less than $.05/click. Since there are no other ads for some of those keywords, there's certainly no sense to pay the current minimum for new keywords.

We recently lowered our daily budget and increased that amount to our daily budget with Google AdWords.

We'll continue using them as we like to get the exposure to some sites that don't use Google AdWords.

But we haven't added any new keywords for well over a year.

We tried to signup with Overture Japan for a Japanese language campaign, but they wanted us to jump through way too many hoops to get approved. I complained to U.S. Overture a couple of times about it, but never heard back. Much easier to run a Japanese language campaign with AdWords!

[MainSoft]

Hi Brad,

Please have a look at the thread titled "My experience with Yahoo! Search marketing vs. Google" that I started yesterday. It seems that we have drawn the same conclusions from our experience with Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Greetings from Paris.
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[edited by: engine at 1:51 pm (utc) on Mar. 14, 2006]
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