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I complained one time that my clicks tripled from Friday to Monday. My customers don't shop on the weekends. Overture's excuse was that sales go up on the weekends. The last time I had a click problem they told me the exact opposite.
What gives?
They mentioned that for the day there were more than 13,000 searches for this term. The previous month, according to the report they send us, indicates total searches of around 25,000 for the month and the previous September indicates only 6600 for the month. Where are these searches coming from??? Over has lost clients not added them. AOL must have been a hefty percentage. How then do you explain a sudden jump to 13,000 in one day. Something smells!
Eliot Proctor
[edited by: Marcia at 10:59 pm (utc) on Aug. 19, 2002]
[edit reason] TOS - no promo sigs with posts [/edit]
One of my bids mysteriously jumped to $10.00 a bid from 1.66. Overture is screwed.
They are not as bad as Sprinks yet, but having to try and login 2-3 times. Yeah, sure their click protection works. I though about taking a .10 bid and clicking $10.00 off it in one dat and then complain to see what happens.
I went from $400 in one day to over $1,100. You have to put three days worth of funds in and my credit cards have a daily limit of $1,000. I had to fight with them for two days over this.
Matters directly concerning support or service issues need always to be addressed to the company in question; we're not the Overture CSRs here, nor are we for Sprinks. By the same token, neither are we a promotional venue.
Aside from that, I'm a little unclear here - is there anything else we can help with, or anything we need to discuss here?
[edited by: Marcia at 11:24 pm (utc) on Aug. 19, 2002]
We know the IP address, date, time, referral string, PPC partner for every single click registered.
What I can't understand is why you are complaining about getting more traffic. Surely that's why you bid in the first place ? If you have got your sums right and conversion rate is good, then your results should (all things being much the same) be that much better.
Many of our clients cry out for more niche keywords to bid on. We have one client who has had over 120 visits today for a phrase that had typically got 5-10. We investigated the IP addresses, we confirmed that orders were consistent with the conversions and at 6 pence a click the client is over the moon. Same client had another keyword with over 100 visits on a keyword that usually got 5-10 and it turned out to be an over exuberant affiliate lining his pockets. We are waiting for a ruling on the refund for that one. Without tracking the traffic our client would have happily paid the exta £50 for the bogus traffic. (it wasn't on Overture by the way).
I understand there was a slight backlog in bringing the search totals up to date, but the historical figures are just that, historical. It gives you a feel for likely traffic but no more than that. It's why you see 5 or 10 companies paying $3-5 dollars for keywords that show only 30 or 40 searches a month. Those are the sort of bun fights we try to steer clear of.
Must say we have NEVER had a problem with logging in, and we must do it hundreds of times a day collectively.
Yes, I track my clicks with two different scripts and I even know who is clicking me and Overture could care less about either of these. Right now, Overture is king and they answer to no one. They went from being a business to an almost horizontal monopoly.
I built a site. The site took off. Three people in my city copied everything off my site. We sued them several times. In return I get emails telling me that they were going to click us on Overture every day and they have.
More traffic....Hmmmm.
Normal Friday about $100.
Abusive Friday about $400.
And I keep track of my CCR and it is sooooo low on these days and Overture won't do anything.
HELP!
They all failed badly. We got a refund (inc our test costs) once we produced the evidence.
In fairness to them Credit Card protection is not foolproof after many years so it isn't a suprise PPC's havn't got great click protection yet.
And what is the evidence that we need to make sure to have to protect ourselves and also get a refund if necessary?
The fraud was over a span of months. I provided times, dates, IP addresses, what the IP addresses resolved to, the keyword, referrer, user agent, and proof that the clicks were coming from a competitor. They gave me a refund, and said it would not happen again because they put on additional filters. Well, they did not put on any additional filters, and the clicks kept coming. I finally emailed the competitor and told them to stop. The competitor apologized and offered to refund the money...
I had the same problem with another competitor on FindWhat, and provided the same evidence, but they could not find the fraud. Needless to say, I no longer use FindWhat.
As webdiversity said, you need to know all of this info to have a case. Simply saying the click rate went up is not good enough. And, Overture does not seem to think much of 3rd party click tracking tools. I have never used them, but they said that they are not reliable. (I use a proprietary perl script to track my PPC).
IP addresses, what the IP addresses resolved to, referrer, user agent, and proof that the clicks were coming from a competitor.
I don't know how to grab this information.
I had noticed the click activity and was going to wait until Aug. completed, so I could send complete logs into Over.
Their blurb, mentioned something about catching most fraud activity before the $'s were deducted from our balance, but this fraud activity slipped through their front end filter, but was caught after the fact...
We have approx. 30-50 live accounts at any one time at Overture, and have always been pleased with the "fraud protection".. I would rate Ah-ha right up there with Overture... Kanoodle, now we're talking another ball game... I'm about to give up on them.. Fraud activity over the last couple of months is ridiculous...
My only complaint about Overture is the oingo.com/domainpark/ click activity... Over should dump oingo, and the poor traffic that comes in from them... The clicks aren't signifigant in number, so I've never made it an issue with our Over rep..
