Yahoo Search Marketing / Overture Review

Overture, now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing, is Yahoo's Pay Per Click Advertising Solution. Many regard Overture & (Google) Adwords as the best Pay Per Click advertising solutions in terms of traffic quality & reach. As a result of the traffic quality the bids for many search terms are significantly higher than you will find with the smaller Pay Pay Click Search Engines. However, Return on Investment is often higher as well.

Careful selection of keywords can help to keep the Cost Per Click reasonable. With Overture, you can view the bids of other advertisers for a given search term. This transparency can create opportunities to maximize your exposure with a higher positioned ad at a lower cost per click. Look for large bid gaps and bid in the middle. Overture's 'proxy bidding' will lower your cost to one cent above the next highest bid.

Overture provides Geotargeting (and local search) which allows your ad to be shown only in specific countries, regions, or cities. This feature can make your campaign more efficient as you are only advertising to areas your business can service.

Overture's interface is easy to use and allows keywords to be placed into groups for easy editing of ad creatives or bid prices. Any new or revised ads are subject to editorial approval. Ads are usually reviewed within a few days - but sometimes in just a few minutes. Due to this occasional delay in ad approval, we like to test ad creatives on Google Adwords first & then run the same keywords/ads on Overture.

We should note that Overture is the only PPC which has ever declined our keywords or changed our ads. In some cases, approved keywords were rejected when we tweaked the ad creative. In other cases, our ad text was changed by Overture's editorial staff to emphasize the keywords. The revised ads looked spammy & did not always resemble English. While these issues haven't been rare for us, enough of our keywords remain unmolested to maintain profitable campaigns on Overture...but we give A Lot more business to Google Adwords.

Overture also offers a conversion tracking tool for those of you with a shopping cart. This provides a clearer picture of Return on Investment.

Conversion rates will vary due to product, industry, ad position, ad creatives, landing pages, seasonality, & the law of averages.

Using a control set of keywords, a control ad format and the same landing page format as we use with other advertising networks, Overture's Pay Per Click Traffic is converting at 35% for our chosen keywords. Return on Investment is 90%.

Conclusion: Highly Recommended for Traffic Quality and Reach