Overture is the largest pay per click engine out there today. It is owned by Yahoo and will soon change it's name to 'Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions'. It has the largest reach of distribution results. If you're listed in Overture your website is listed on:
and more, with the list growing by the day (For a full list of distribtion partners click here)
We've found Overture to be easy to work with and extremely quick to get submitted keyword results approved (Time is money after all!). It's easy to control your keyword bids and change your descriptions also.
If you're tracking your pay per click campaign (you should be!) Overture has some of the best tools in the industry to help you do this, including Overture's free Conversion Counter.
The Conversion Counter measures the number of clicks that lead to conversions (sales) on your site. Conversion Counter gives you conversion data (including count, rate and cost-per-conversion) at the keyword, category and account level for all match types.
So you can know exactly how each Overture keyword is performing, drop the ones that aren't performing (wasting your money) and bid higher for the keywords that bring you the most sales.
Another popular Overture tool is the Search Term Suggestion Tool, which shows you how often people search for a certain keyword or phrase, so you don't end up bidding on a keyword that no one is searching for.
This is a great way to do some market research on what your customers are searching for, and gather even more ideas for the specific keywords they're using.
In addition to the standard pay per click advertising (called Precision Match), Overture also offers other advertising options:
- Local Match (so you can target customers near your business location or within your service area.)
- Content Match (your listings are displayed to targeted customers as they view articles, product reviews and more.)
- Site Match (you submit your listings to the organic search engine results and instead of waiting for months, your site gets reviewed and possibly included extremely quickly - as well as refreshed every 48 hours)
What does this mean to you? It means that more people see your website (which increases brand recognition), more people have access to your website, more people click through and more people buy: in short you make more money.
There is one downside to Overture however. The minimum bid on any keyword is $0.10 (many pay per click programs have a minimum bid of $0.03 - 0.05) so in general you could be spending a bit more on clicks.
However if your quality of traffic is higher (and many website owners agree that it is), you wil be making more sales and getting a higher conversion rate so it is definitely worth it to start a campaign with Overture.
Overture also has the means and the technology to deal more effectively with click fraud (when someone keeps clicking on your site with no intention to buy) than smaller or mid-sized ppc search engines.
While many of the smaller (and free) ppc engines are rumored to be rife with click fraud, Overture has a sophisticated Click Protection System that:
"...prevents unqualified clicks from being charged to our advertisers by using a variety of proprietary techniques to review clicks on a near real-time basis...we continuously monitor click activity across our entire network as a result. "
While click fraud is a serious problem that needs to be addressed by ALL ppc search engines, my bet is on Overture for being the most able to keep click fraud to a minimum.
All in all, given their huge distribution across the most popular (and most used) search engines, as well as their amazing tracking tools, advertising options and campaign reports, Overture promises to be the KING of pay per click search for a very long time.
If you'd like to read more about using Overture to advertise your site, their own website has great tips and tricks, strategies and resources to maximize your pay-per-click campaign results.
Plus if you sign up now you get a $25 credit for Self Serve or $50 off Fast Track accounts (that's FREE MONEY people). To check it out click below:
Enhance Interactive's partner network receives more than one billion queries each month. Enhance doesn't necessarily have the reach that Overture does however they can offer you some interesting search alternatives.
With Enhance paid listings, your site is displayed across search engines like Earchlink, Infospace and MSN as well as smaller niche directories.
Also, Enhance paid listings are sometimes embedded within organic search engine results (instead of being separated). This has been proven to increase the effectiveness of advertising campaigns:
In a 2003 study, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) determined that Paid Listings embedded within search engine results pages were more than twice as effective as regular search results for driving clicks and sales to advertiser web sites.
This can also help reduce the risk of click fraud.
To help you with your advertising campaign, Enhance offers tools like the keyword suggestion tool, top 5 performing keywords list and an easy-to-use 'Manage your listing' section where you can separate out click results by domain.
Another nice feature with Enhance is that the minimum bid starts at $0.03 and since it isn't as popular as Overture you can usually get top position for your keywords for $0.10 or less.
The only downside to Enhance is that, of course, your reach is not as wide as with Overture and the quality of traffic may be different. Also Overture (for now) has much better tracking tools and tends to be faster at getting keywords approved.
However with the low minimum bid and embedded search engine results, Enhance can be an excellent secondary pay per click option that will lower your overall cost per click.
If you decide to start a campaign with Enhance, you can take advantage of their bonus offer right now of a $25.00 credit towards pay per click traffic (That's MORE free money).
