Understanding Overture Basics - Tips, Experience?

[Lynn Terry]

I began my first PPC Campaign with Overture this past week for an affiliate program, using a landing page on my own site. Decided to test the waters, as I've heard a lot of good reports & experiences!

I'm lost, though - All of my listings are now "offline" and I cant figure out for the life of me why or how to bring them back to online status. Any tips/suggestions?

Anything at all to do with Overture - I'm all ears

[pschlegel]

Lynn,

Overture is a completely different animal than adwords.
A couple questions:

1) Did you get your initial listings approved and THEN they
went off line?

2) Did your funds run out (sorry for the obvious question,
but I have to ask).

3) Your terms may have been taken offline because of
Overture's ClickIndex which states:

"Overture uses a variety of methods to identify listings
that may not be meeting our users' expectations. One
of these methods is Click Index™. Click Index
systematically analyzes a listing's click performance
based on its click-through rate relative to the listing's
position within our search results. By analyzing historical
click-through rates and patterns, our systems can analyze
listings to determine which are performing at a significantly
lower rate than others in the same marketplace. Listings
with a significantly low performance rate will be taken offline,
but may be allowed back into the marketplace if changes are
made to the listing or the site content"

4) You may have been taken offline because of Overture's
MatchDriver algorithm which maps many keywords to one keywords.
Most commonly it will map misspellings and plurals to a keyword, but
it can do wackier mappings like map "how to learn french" to
"learn french", so if you submit both terms, Overture will remove
the "how to" variation as it considers it a duplicate (it actually
gets way wackier than this example).

Now a warning: At the John Reese seminar, many of the
people who did well with adwords couldn't get Overture to
work. On the bright side, I met a fellow who works with
John Keel, a well-respected overture Expert who says they
have no problems getting Overture to work well for their
clients.

Warning 2: If you're tracking at the keyword level, the words
converting on Google won't necessarily be the same ones that
will convert on Overture. I used to think I could just take the
keywords that converted well on Overture and add only
those to Overture. Apparently this isn't true. I haven't corrected
this yet.

Hope: There is a way to add massive amounts of keywords to
Overture via the use of an Macro utility called



The actual tutorial for doing so is at:



Hope that helps.

By the way, if you didn't initially succeed at getting listings, then
submit just ONE term first, get it approved, and then add the rest.

Paul Schlegel

[Lynn Terry]

[pschlegel]

[Wayne]

[Lynn Terry]

I dont know how to tell how many impressions I got, except to click on each search term individually. It wasnt that many (400+ if I remember correctly), as I had only added 20 or so keywords originally, and then added about 30 more right before it went offline. I was just trying to figure out how it all worked

Surely there is somewhere in our accounts that will tell us why they are offline and what steps to take to reactivate them?

[Lynn Terry]

[Lynn Terry]