Overture Review

Posted: March 30, 2003

Overture PPC was the first company to take full advantage of the pay per click advertising model with large syndication deals to third party search engines. .

The distribution network they started several years ago has never slowed down, and Overture continues to look for new and interesting ways to introduce their model in not only search engines, but in other forms of media as well

Overture’s largest partner is Yahoo, one of the top portals in the entire world. These two worked closely together for a few years until Yahoo acquired Overture in 2003, making Overture a strong media network which will only continue to expand and be integrated into Yahoo’s vast network reach. Yahoo’s acquisition of Overture has ensured that pay per click advertising model will be around for quite some time.

Overture’s bidding process is exactly what you would expect from a pay per click search engine. If you bid more than your competitors, your ad is shown higher in search results. It is a true auction style environment.

Because of the simplicity of this process, the important feature of Google AdWords, CTR (click through rate), is often overlooked on Overture in favor of actual positioning. It is possible on Overture to have highly targeted keywords and titles that will gather your ad a higher CTR rate than competitors listed above you.

This is the exception, and in most cases, the top 2-4 bids at Overture receive the majority of the clicks. However, position 4 can be cheaper per bid than position 1, and if you can get a higher CTR with a lower bid, you will achieve a larger number of visitors and exposure than your other competitors.

If you use Overture Pay Per Click services, read our Overture FAQs for detailed information.

The Overture Pay Per Click Advantage

? True auction style, what you see is what you get
? Large distribution network, including Yahoo
? Distribution network for non search engine advertising
? Ability to place different bids between partner and syndication ads
? Smart matching
? Auto bidding - lowers CPC automatically to $0.01 over next lowest position
? Shows live ranking for each keyword bid
? Great keyword suggestion tool
? Strong click fraud detection

The Overture Pay Per Click Disadvantage

? Minimum bid of $0.10
? Minimum monthly spend of $35
? Slow customer service
? Keyword stemming causes a lot of niche bids to not be worthwhile
? Number of shown partner ads changes often, and can differ between keywords, so a need to know how many ads are shown on partner sites to understand your total exposure and optimal position

Due to Overture’s partnership with MSN and Yahoo, it has developed such a large partnership network that this pay per click search engine can not be overlooked in search engine marketing.

Overture is one of the two pay per click search engines that we suggest everyone try (The other is Google AdWords.) Overture’s ads are reviewed before they go live, so it can take a few days to see changes to your account. It also takes a couple days to get an account approved.

Overture has two drawbacks which can make it difficult to get your maximum exposure. The first is slow customer support. If you need to use their support option, we suggest you read our Overture FAQs and the FAQs located inside your Overture control panel first. This might save you a lot of time overall.

The second is a shifting of number of ads shown on various search engine partners. On Yahoo, it currently ranges from 2-4 ads shown at the top of the page. If you are happy with your exposure for a particular keyword at position 3, and Yahoo suddenly changes its display ads to 2, you’ll see a large drop in impressions for that keyword. As you can easily have one hundred or more different keyword bids with Overture, keeping on top of these exposure changes can be time consuming.

Even with these drawbacks, we heavily recommend everyone try Overture. Their partner network makes their total exposure too large a demographic to ignore in your search engine marketing campaigns.

Try Overture PPC Today. Results you can’t ignore.

Related Information:

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