Dear Overture, Without This Change, You'll Never Catch Adwords

The crux of this article?

Overture, desperately, desperately needs to clean up their "partner site" traffic. Or, at the very least, they need to follow in Google's footsteps and allow their advertisers to opt out of the "partner" network, just as Google does.

Why don't they do this?

Well according to my stats, "partner sites" at Overture send me most of my PPC traffic. We still make a profit, but that's in spite of this "partner site" traffic, and not because of it.

The funny thing is that Overture knows that this traffic is garbage. Why else would they send me a small refund everytime I complain about this traffic? If they actually thought that this traffic was quality, don't you think they would say something like "this traffic is quality, we are not sure what you are talking about?" instead of "here's 200 pounds, sorry for the trouble?"

The thing is, traffic that comes straight from the Yahoo Search site converts like crazy. Traffic that comes from most of their "partner sites" is absolute garbage, coming from completely off-topic web sites and shady looking directories. Am I to believe that a tiny directory site with an Alexa ranking of 2,000,000 has the capability to send me more traffic for "home equity loan" than Yahoo? Are you kidding me?

I really hope that Overture includes an opt-out button for partner traffic soon, but I have a feeling that their bottom line would be absolutely destroyed if this did this, so don't hold your breath. Until they do this, we'll continue to tread lightly at Overture and spend most of our money at Google Adwords and MSN Adcenter.

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Filed under: Making Money Online