Frustration

[Brains]

Does anyone else get extremely frustrated with Overture and their editorial process? Having just submitted my adverts after a very small change I find that some are accepted and some are declined even though they have the same description. What's more, it's virtually impossible to tell what is wrong.

Venting of frustration over....


BRAINS

[angelabx]

Yes they are frustrating but Miva UK are a million times worse.

Their sales team beg for your business and then the editorial team reject you!

[km8]

Does anyone else get extremely frustrated with Overture

Yes.

[EDIT] Apparently that reply is too short.

Blah, blah de blah. [/EDIT]

[stevey]

They've lost my business anyway through their silly procedures. I can't be bothered with them anymore.

DUH!!!!!

stevey

[Shane]

I've been trying to change a listing from like ... blah.com/pageurl to ..... blah.com/pageurl.htm ... and it's a farce !

all I've been doing is adding .htm to the listing as I moved servers for the site, ..it's been rejected 5 times !... I rang up to get it sorted and the guy said I'd have to use a submission sheet to change it and he'd email me one ... like wtf ! I have one already which is lucky as I never got the one he was sending.

what a joke... overture could do so much better if they had even the slightest inkling and interest in giving us what WE WANT and need in regard to advertising tools and procedures...

but I guess it's too much trouble to do that... ;

[getvisible]

successful companies make it easy for people to do business with them.

Just like successful sites make it easy to buy from them.

[Brains]

Didn't realise problems were so widespread.

BRAINS

[hellywin]

Hi Brains,

We've had the same probs here - it turns out if you submit your ads online, they are approved or rejected by a 'robot'.

We got ourselves an account manager who looks into everything and approves or rejects manually.

Cheers,

[Webcampaign]

For the last few years I have stuck to Adwords because apart from everything good about their interface etc I didn't want to spend another second venting my frustration over Overture.

I have had an account since the Goto days and would love to ramp up the spending so as to match my Adwords budget but unfortunately as hard as I try Overture seem to work against my best efforts.

I started 2006 with the belief I could work through all the previous problems and actually submit listings and get them approved in say 48 hours.

Unfortunately I find that I am submitting url a and url b with similar content - one gets approved and one declined. There is absolutely no logic to it and I'm in the process of asking for an explanation. It seems that each reviewer judges a page in a different way.

Anyway whilst this goes on I am wasting my time. I can think of better ways to spend an hour than to submit 30 listings only to see them all declined.

I'm awaiting a response and will then determine whether it is best to go back to what I did in 2004 and 2005 - namely ignoring Overture.

The ball is in their court. They either want my business or you don't.

[OLBG]

I barely do PPC but did try them about a year ago for some "tipster" type terms. Like has been said some were accepted and some rejected with virtually no difference. It then became a fight to basiclaly get anything of use going. I unltimately gave up and cancelled the account with all my intial £60? still in it which they wouldnt refund and it appeared like it would take at least 4 hours work to get any clicks from it.

[marky]

Overture can be one of the most frustrating and inconsistent tools to use out there. The editorial process drives me mad. I only continue to use them as I find the traffic converts so well.

[R King]

Have any of you experienced similar problems with overtures charges - to what they are doing to me right now?

BTW I am relatively new to affiliate promotion ( am running part time experimentation with various progs when i have time), but I've been working online for 3 years, now for an agency - all channels etc etc



I set up an account with overture on tuesday, debited a card,
had the reply back about listing needing to be reviewd - & up to 10 days which didnt surprise me as even for our biggets accounts we still struggle to get ads reviewed in three days.

However I got an email through thursday evening to let me know ads had been approved, and theyd stuck them all live. - Unfortunatley I only read this last night, & when I went straight to login to the account - the system wouldnt recognise my login [I am positive this is them not me!!]

On top of this my budget hosting site has been down for much of yesterday and today, and then today I have received two more mailings from overture to say how much more £££ they are taking off my card to feed my account because they are sending loads more traffic through to my unavailable site.

As im just dabling in aff mktg outside my day job this is quite painful!
It appears I didnt looked into their t's & c's properly when I set up the account - but as they run with deposits and no apparant capping facility, wouldnt it seem pretty logical to charge whats in the account alone ?? otherwise why would they provide so many diferent deposit amounts?


Their f*****g useless system aside, have I been very naive or is this absolute lunacy on their part?!!

Can any of you offer me advice/ other than for me to start hammering their phones at 9 am on Monday?

[Webcampaign]

This doesn't surprise me - the whole ballgame with Overture is frustrating. I see a post that says the only reason they have put up with Overture is because of the good conversion. This is what I have heard many a time, so in my wisdom I am trying to get some of this good converting traffic....though Overture don't make it easy!

R King - I have been in the same situation as you. When I first started with Overture I'm sure you could limit the number of deposits on your card per day.

It seems now that if you click Budget on - you are capped per month rather than day.

They state:

Please note: "Your approximate daily budget is a target only. You may see fluctuations in your actual daily click charges due to changes in search volume, but your total monthly click charges should be close to your target monthly budget (target monthly budget is calculated as 30 times your approximate daily budget, for a rolling 30 days). If your total monthly click charges exceed your target monthly budget by more than 15%, you may be entitled to a refund."

This seems an all round less precise way than how payment used to be managed. Your only protection is to keep the deposits small.

Overture won't care if your site was down, at least Google send me emails when my ad urls can't be reached.

Good luck on Monday and let us know what they say.

Cheers

Andy

[Webcampaign]

Well there I was thinking all of my pending Overture listings would be declined- based on the fact that similar ones had been declined for insufficient content when surprize surprise I get the following:

Approved Search Listings: 12
Declined Search Listings: 1
Pending Search Listings: 0

This to me is clear evidence that it really comes down to the luck of the draw - what reveiwer you get - a tight one - or a let everything through one.

I can understand the reasoning for a listing being declined but I do object to similar listings getting different treatments. It means I can end up wasting a lot of time.

Oh well I have sent an email to the support center asking very politely why this inconsistency is so common.

Will let you know what they say.

Andy

[renegade]

I hate Overture, recently entered a whole load of ads only to have the interface get itself in a muddle after I'd entered them all but before setting the bids so I lost the lot and I'm not going to do them aall again - at least not until I've forogt all the time I wasted! Grrrrrrrrrr.