Overture Mistakes – Expensive, Yet Avoidable!
A real case study of a bad experience and how to do better next time.
– by Ginette Degner
If you've ever managed your own Overture account you might empathize with the frustrations one of our readers shared. This article recounts what took place and offers suggestions to counter the quirky, oftentimes surprisingly expensive, details of managing a pay-per-click ad campaign.
The following account is a simplified version of one user's experience with Overture. All of the details are just as they were presented to us although we've added clarity in places where ambiguity might otherwise be cause for confusion.
Reader: I signed up for their $200 Fast Track Professional program. I provided lots of information concerning our multiple sources of revenue that we wanted covered. What they came up with ignored our product lines, and their keyword selection was highly generalized and used BROAD MATCH. All the traffic was sent to one URL, our home page. The search terms they recommended were so highly generalized that we would have been swamped by clicks from non-qualified prospects.
They never warned me that, if I didn't have a high-speed Internet connection, their MANAGE PRODUCT pages would take 6-8 min to load. Nor was I initially aware that every time I performed an operation the pages would be required they reload. By the time I got my DSL high speed connection installed a few days later I was already frustrated with them.
Although the first proposal I received from them projected my monthly costs to be around $4500, I submitted a monthly budget of just $100
SENews: We are no longer advising anyone to use the Fast Track Professional Program. Our experience has been that Overture's staff tends to choose the terms which will generate the highest number of potential clicks. In the overwhelming majority of cases, this does not equate to qualified traffic for most online businesses.
The problem is that novices tend to focus on the quantity of tra...
