Warning: Overture Fraudulent Click Throughs

[GordonH]

I thought I would alert people using Overture that we have had a big increase in click throughs for unusual search terms sometimes amounting to thousands of clicks per day when those terms previously only generated one a month.
This has been hundreds of dollars per day.

We only use sponsored search.

All of the clicks seem to be down to search sites that link back to one company who pay people to click on ads in pages which are pulled up from overture.

I contacted overture who told me that this company were not one of their search partners and they do not allow incentivised clicking.
I then emailed them the html code of one of the pages the links were on and they admitted then that this was their links but that they should not be there.
Overture are now investigating, so check your logs.

This is only the second incident in 5 years of using overture and last time they contacted me and gave a refund as I had not noticed.

[Q151]

I have had a much worse experience with Overture. I happened to login to my company's bank account one afternoon to find that Overture was sucking out every single penny we had in $5 increments. I immediately logged into my Overture account and placed it on hold, then logged into our marketing email account to find a load of messages from Overture. The first one stated that our account had run out of funds, and so had been shut down until we deposited more. Every message after that was an invoice for the $5 that we were continuously being charged.

I tried calling and emailing Yahoo! Overture over the course of two weeks, but they would not do anything about the problem, even though it was an error on their part. Finally, the situation culminated in several conference calls between myself, our bank, and Overture, at which point Overture finally refunded the money.

Needless to say, I will never - EVER - use Overture again. Besides, Google AdWords has brought us much better results.

[GordonH]

I found that Google did not work.
To be in a position where people actually saw your ad you had to pay such large amounts that it was not worth it, because the number of clicks you were getting was so high.
I did a controlled test just to satisfy myself and $500 worth of clicks produced no sales.

[Q151]

Really? Wow, our experience with Google AdWords has been the exact opposite.

[GordonH]

I think our customer acquisition cost was about $500 even with stripped down and fine tuned ads. Not worth the money.
I must admit that it did not look that bad until I really went into the stats.

There were plently of sign ups but that apparent success masked the real story.

[Q151]

What keywords did you use?

[GordonH]

I don't really want to get into all thedetails but originally we had a classic widespread campaign covering large numbers of keyphrases. I found that only a few of them brought in any visitors so I scrapped the whole campaign and concentrated on popular keywords. This tactic has worked well with overture using broad match.

If we were not in the top 5 or 6 we were getting no clicks.
To get in the top 5 was costing $4 a click.
Conversion rate was about 100:1.

It was simply a waste of money.

The test I did recently involved bidding for 48 hours on very specific keywords relating to reseller hosting and it brought in no sales at all so I decided to not bother again.

[GordonH]

Put it this way, I was ewasting enough money on google every month to buy a car.

I had the choice of continuing to waste that money or give myself a pay rise.

[Q151]

Hey, don't get defensive! I was just trying to help you out. :)

Seeing as you're pretty successful with Overture, though, I'll leave you alone.

[GordonH]

Sorry, I didn;t mean to come over like that.
I hea rof people having great success with Google but I have never managed to do it.
However (and this is the odd thing) our click throughs from search engine listings in Google convert to sales very well.
We get quite a lot of our business from Google without having to pay for it.

[surgematrix]

Folks, I agree with all of you. I have used both Google and overture. They are rip off. Beware not to throw your money on these companies. Overture changed their billing policies to automatically deduct money from your account. Before, you used to pay as you see necessary. Now, you cannot do that. These people are crooks. Like one of the posters said, I will give myself a pay raise instead of throwing free money on these companies.

[GordonH]

There is a way to get round the overture billing thing.
I had an old out of date card number in there (expired card)
I made that my primary billing card so it always fails and I have to go in and manually pay by selecting the real valid card!

[GordonH]

Actually I liked the line that said they would automatically charge my card by $17,000 each time when our daily spend is only about $100.

[ldcdc]

Actually I liked the line that said they would automatically charge my card by $17,000 each time when our daily spend is only about $100.They sure do know how to do business. :crazy: