Any one experience this?

Overture vs. Click tracking software

[jcmoon]

We ran Overture for 3 months. The first month was fine, nothing fishy. The second cost us a lot more without adding many words or raising the bid. The third month, it went crazy.

Comparing referrals from Overture on our click tracking software and the clicks Overture claimed occured - there was a big difference.

The last month, Overture reported over 800 clicks and our software said just under 300.

Any ideas?

[wordy]

jcmoon,

Does your tracking software pick up Overture "Search Partners"?

You will find a load of junk clicks that you are paying for from sites that Overture consider to be mainstream search partners apart from Yahoo! and MSN.

[jcmoon]

Wordy,

Yes, we considered altavista and some others. This website generally didn't get a lot of hits from partners of Yahoo or Google. Esp. since we are not on the Content Search.

[Lady Seraphim]

Am I reading this right - people are clicking on your ads, but aren't landing on your actual homepage?

[Philosopher]

how is your click tracking software setup? Does it use javascript to track the clicks? If so that may be the case as as another poster mentioned Yahoo seems to have LOTS of crappy partners these days that use some pretty shady tactics to get clicks. It's possible your tracking software isn't picking those up if it requires javascript.

[jcmoon]

People are clicking on my ads, but the page isn't being fully executed. Meaning, the person/thing clicking my ad backs out of the click before the page is shown.

As far as the tracking software goes, it does pick up the shaddy websites that our ads show up on. It's amazing the sites that our ads show up on. Most of them have nothing to do with our product.

[Lady Seraphim]

Just wondering as there was a similar thread on AdWords a little while back.

It was noted that anything up to 10% of visitors will not make it to your site either because they click stop or back, or they are on dial up and the page is taking too long to load or because your server is serving the pages too slow and again, the user clicks away. Tracking software has also been known to slow down the page serving speed so it might be worth testing this on different browsers on PCs with cleared caches.

As above, also could be because the browser has Java/Javascript/Cookies disabled - it really depends on how your tracking software works.

[wordy]

Lady Seraphim,

This is not a 10% issue, more like 70-80%.

This thread goes back a few months which first caught my interest in the topic:

[webmasterworld.com...]

My spend on YSM! has reduced dramatically - it is now just plain annoying I spend a lot of time playing PPC cat and mouse on keyword phrases that these junk YSM! "search partners" are adding too quickly for YSM! to keep up with.