ReviewOverture |
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Review Of Overture(Review updated - February 2005)
Quick Summary
ReviewOverture (formerly GoTo) is, by most measures, world's leading pay-per-click search engine. (Pay-per-click means that you place bids on relevant keywords (the more you bid the higher up the results you come), and only pay a person clicks on your search term).At the time of writing, bids now start at $0.10 on the US version of Overture (Overture also has other versions addressing other countries) and go up in $0.01 increments to any value that you like. However in my experience it is far more cost effective to bid low on lots of keywords, than to place high bids on the most popular keywords. Ideally - to get best results - you should bid on hundreds, or better yet thousands of relevant keywords. Fortunately Overture makes this relatively easy as you can submit all your keywords in an Excel spreadsheet. Additionally with Overture you have full control over the title and descriptions of your listings, you can add more keywords as needed (subject to editorial review), and can also delete keywords. A range of powerful tools make it easy to manage your bids and money in your account. One of their best features is an auto-bidding feature: You can set the maximum you're prepared to bid for each of your keywords and the system automatically raises or lowers your actual bid, up to your limit, so as to maintain the best rank possible. All keyword bids that you submit to Overture are subject to editorial review (you can only bid on keywords that are relevant to your site), which means that the results are useful to web surfers. This plus, great marketing, and syndication of Overture's search results into other search engines, means it's a very effective (and low cost) way of generating targeted traffic to your site. Some people complain (I see this on webmaster message boards from time-to-time) that Overture's relevancy guidelines about which search terms and URLs to accept, are overly restrictive. While it is true that they have tougher guidelines than some of their competitors, I have personally never (yet) had a problem with this issue - so I tend to feel that carefully following the rules - should, hopefully, avoid any problems. That said, it is true that there are some relatively tough relevancy restrictions on affiliate sites, so if this is what you're promoting, be sure to read the guidelines before you sign up. Getting the most from Overture, does require some strategy, so it is worth investing some time (and money) to research how to use it properly. This will definitely save you money in the long run - and also help you get better results. ConclusionUsing Overture is a breeze, and definitely brings in a good Return On Investment. What's more they have lots of traffic, so can send you clicks fast.On the negative side, I would point out that Overture does seem to have more competition between advertisers than many of the competitors (not to mention a relatively high $0.10 minimum bid), so they can be more expensive per click than some of their rivals. In summary, I continue to spend my own advertising dollars at Overture, and I highly recommend that others do the same. Click here to visit Overture
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