FW: [thelist] Is Overture worth it? (was: Is Yahoo worth it?)

[John Dobson]

> And is anyone happily using overture? What situations do you 
> find Overture
> being a valuable service?

Overture vs Happy?  Now there's the rub.

My experience of using overture as opposed to google suggests the following.

Whereas Google is very much of the attitude, lets get it working first , then sort out the fine details.  Overture takes the opposite standpoint.

There is a minimum 3 WORKING day time limit between suggesting your adverts to them and the adverts being checked.  If then those adverts do not pass the quite stringent (computerised?) checking procedure, you have to re-submit them and wait the next minimum 3 WORKING days.  It can easily turn into a two week venture just to get your adverts okayed.

The place we fowled up was that the receiving page did not have the exact key words that we were tieing our adverts to, so we had to go for the obligatory wait.

It was great that they supplied a phone number you can call, but I found the attitude of the call centre left a lot to be desired, and a lack of interest in even finding out what your question really was.  I did duly complain to overture, but have had no response as yet.

To top it all off the amount of impressions we are getting from overture is about a quarter of those same keywords on google.  But that might be due to the industry we are involved in.

To give them credit though, the CTR and conversion ratios are actually marginally better than google.

John