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Thanks.
I'm very surprised they rejected your listings if you are a store that actually carries the products. Did you not link straight to each product you sell? Also, yes, I think there are subtle differences per editor but lately they've been pretty consistently tough across the board on any listing going in. What a waste of their time. Keep the spam out should be their job and not being "holier than thou". Ah well, can't wait for Yahoo and others to build their own PPC systems so they don't need OverManure someday.
Rather than going the "why can't these clowns get their act together" route (as I wanted to), I patiently composed a long explanatory email as to why I thought they should be allowed. This ended up in a lengthy email dialog with one of the review staff. End result - 37 accepted and the comment "it was a pleasure sorting this out with you", or something like that, received.
What's that about catching more flies with honey . . .?
However, on the whole I do agree it's becoming very painful doing business with Overture
Kinda makes me mad that I've gotta waste all this time just to get a dinky little keyword listing.
Good Luck:-)
Or an icon:
"A" for affiliate
"B" for BUY stuff
"C" for content only
etc.
imho
On one hand they advise you to bid for the first three spots in order to have best exposure for your listing (and we all know how much the first three spots can cost) and on the other hand they require your site to provide free content for visitors. I don't see how can you at the same time provide free content and pay premium price for the listings. If the free engine such as google had such standards I could understand it but one wouldn't expect it from the internet yellow pages. "We'll take your money, but only if you will give free stuff to our visitors." :)
In their reply they repeated their policy and suggested (again) that I change my new title and descriptioin to comply. They totally ignored the great police work that I did for them :) but did tell me not to hesitate to contact them if I need any further assistance.
Oh yea, they thanked me for choosing Overture too.
Thanks Overture!
I suggest to anyone that has an existing listing not to change it unless you wanna fill it full of disclaimers.
Another one was, "I could not find the exact keywords right away so I have to decline the listings."
In most cases, I'll be vigilant and send a bold reply explaining that I was extremely dissatisfied with the service they provided me. That I spent one full day submitting keywords, only to have them rejected by some editor who appeared to have some problem with having to work that day. I told them that I refuse to go through the process of re-submitting all my keywords by their bandwidth and memory hogging submission forms. After that I'll usually receive a reply stating that they will look into it more and will have an answer by the end of the day.
On them claiming some sort of membership feature, all you need to do is e-mail them the username and password info and they review it from there. Unless they changed their policy lately that should be good enough. They never asked me to put that info in the description.
They sent me a repeal form, just the excell file was currupt or something =)~
Since then I met with a marketing guy from Overture at the Search Engine Strategies conference. He understood my point, but emphasized they are trying to crack down. I agree they should, but I think they have gone too far. My company allotted me money to increase my Overture budget by about five times this coming year. Frankly, I am not looking forward to submitting new listings, and I am thinking my time and money could be better spent elsewhere. The point is if you are grandfathered with good listings at Overture, don't change them and everything will be good. Judging by this thread I think it's only a matter of time before they make too many people mad, and change their ways some.
Overture requires sites that have registration forms to say so in their
titles or descriptions. This policy should actually save you from paying
for clicks for people that click on your site and then leave when they see
the registration form.A compromise could be to say in your descriptions something like "Register
online or call our toll-free number." If this is a viable option for
you, please resubmit your listings through the DirecTraffic Center at
[secure.overture.com...] and we'll be happy to assist
you.
I'm sure this is just copy from somwhere in their policies area.
It's unfortunate that they are only cracking down on people if a new term is submitted or a new one is added.
If they cracked down on everyone, I wouldn't have any problem with them. But not mentioning anything in their reply email about current listings breaking their policy that I pointed out to them, really shows me that they only care to crack down on a small percentage of their customers. The ones trying to get listed.
It also appears that "he who spends more money, has more leeway in what he lists."
I've pretty much had it with them. I'm seeing much better results on other PPC sites and they are a lot cheaper too.
Or anyone else for that matter.
this is probably one reason why they are clamping down on listings - i think this spider must be designed to help them compare keywords with content and flag questionable URLs for human review.
...which is kinda interesting in that it introduces the opportuntity to cloak content to overture, i spose... hey, maybe there's still some value in those cloaking scripts after all?!!? ;)
They rejected all 11 keywords! I couldn't believe it! I decided it must be one silly individual, and re-submitted some of them, but didn't receive a response at all.
What on earth is going on? Why the change? I don't understand it.
The attitude was typical "we are successful, so we don't care about you"; what a difference from when I spoke to them a year ago and they were actually nice.
I guess I am supposed to write descriptions that don't sound too much like advertising (what a joke).
They also promised a "courtesy" email that would tell me why the listings were rejected, after waiting 6 business days and making a phone call I think the courtesy bit was an insult. I'm still waiting for the email.
How hard would it be for the collective membership here to start an open source ppc? I'm sure we could garner a PR 10 on the thing in about a week.
Always remember that it's totally irrelevant what's "reasonable" to pay per month. The only thing that matters is your ROI (return on investment). Asssuming CTRs are the same for two products, you can afford to spend more on the more profitable product thatn you can on the other. If one product sells for $9 and the other for $1000, you can probably afford to spend more on the second.
Just a thought.
Also, get into the top 3 positions, because Overture sends these results to other search engines, thereby getting a larger exposure.
Hope that helps
Philip
I'd say do your own tests with the top spots, but keep an eye on the money.
(Just changed my name from "Ozoilman")
Just for info. We had 1500 click throughs in December for a particular service. From that we got 251 positive responses (pretty good ratio), but over 90% of those *did not come direct from Overture*, but from one or other of the services to which Overture sends top 3 results.
Thought it significant
Philip
Hard to nail it all down sometimes. We've recently played with letting the account run out of money and traffic doesn't go down by much, even goes up sometimes (or as expected by the numbers) I even get 30-50 referrals a day from overture.com without any money. Not sure why that happens, caches but doesn't cost anything?
