Rumor Has It

[newriver]

Rumor has it Overture is about to announce something we won't like.
I hear through the grapevine that they are going to begin dropping non-performing listings.

[chinook]

That can only accelerate their own problems and possibly their demise. I have been using them for a while now and ever since they went to this max bid thing, I am wishing they didn't have my deposit. For most of my keywords the cost per click is well over $3.00 USD and that is just not worth it in terms of the roi. For the ones that are less, well they aren't listed on msn, which was my prime reason for using overture. Looksmart isn't an option, so what is left is to either forget about msn traffic or hope the ink listings get high enough.

[nzbase]

I think it's a bit more than a rumour ... the quote i put in this was from an Overture newsletter...


Nzbase.com - Overture's 'Click Index' to follow Google?

Google have a rule in their 'Adwords Select' product which dumps any advert not achieving a Click-Through-Rate (CTR) greater than 0.5%. The theory behind this follows the commendable Google spirit to increase relevancy in all results. Practically this can be a headache for advertisers where high impression terms are the only ones receiving decent levels of traffic which can make it difficult to keep above the desired rate.

Overture announced in a recent mailout (July29) that it will launch a 'Click Index' which 'analyzes listing performance based on user input and removes low performing listings to ensure user expectations are being met'.

The question left fairly open here is how 'user input' is defined. If the CTR is set by the advertiser, this system can only be considered a useful tool however if the CTR is set by Overture or some other independant variable, the outcome could substantially increase work loads for PPC management. The rollout was set for late August so an update on the final outcome will follow ...