Be very afraid of...
The Non-targeted PPC Dilemma
How Overture's Content Match is blurring the once laser sharp focus of Search Engine Marketing –by Stephen Mahaney

We recently heard from a reader who wrote...

Could you give me any insight as to why 400+ visitors from Overture resulted in zero conversions on my hotel reservation site?

He went on to explain that he had used the AUTO bid feature with a max bid, that his company owns and manages a hotel reservation site with more than 5,500 pages and has been online for about five years. Their site has had over a dozen individual city pages ranked in the top 10 by Google over a number of months for search terms like Seattle Hotels and consistently enjoyed a conversion rate of 2-5 bookings per 100 visitors over the years from the Google traffic.

In his recent pay-per-click test with Overture, the clicks cost him an average of $2.50 each for the #1 position for the term Seattle Hotels and $1.77 average for the term New York Hotels. He spent a total of $1,014 to get 422 visitors and he was absolutely "shocked" that he received ZERO bookings!

The reader, (we'll call him David), assures us that he "personally monitored the conversion activity very closely to ensure accuracy" and, based on the detailed and systematic way in which he presented the information to us, we believe him. What David and many others are failing to fully understand is there's a world of difference between the convertibility of a site visitor who chances to see, and click, a link vs. one who actually enters your key terms into a search field as part of their proactive process of seeking specific information.

In David's case, the latter type of visitor converts between 2-5% of the time while the former converts, well, ZERO%!

Of course, Overture doesn't care. Their focus has consistently been on broadening their reach into the pockets of the enthusiastically uninitiated and the woefully unknowing.

Case in point. We did some research to see where we might find Overture running the hotel ads of the type...