Re: Is Overture Overtaking the Web??

From: Josh Dahmes <jdahmes_at_ciceron.com>
Date: Fri 28 Feb 2003 17:49:07 -0600

Hello all, Josh Dahmes here, I work for an agency in Minneapolis,
Minnesota.

There have been some comments in some posts recently about the new $.10
minimum at Overture and other options now that the price is no longer
economical. I am writing for a couple different reasons.

First, we manage over 20 different client accounts through Overture and
haven't had a single one even get worried about the new $.10 minimum.
Why? Because it has very little or no impact on any of their costs.
Why? Because if you were bidding between $.05 and $.09 on your terms it
means it wasn't a competitive term, which means you don't have to
constantly be raising and lowering bids, which means you could leave it
at that price and still pay your $.05 anyway. This is of course
assuming you were in the premium positions, because if you weren't there
is a very good chance you were receiving zero traffic anyway, meaning
you weren't paying even a penny. I am sure there may be an exception to
this out there, and maybe those who have been commenting are those very
exceptions. But seriously... how many terms out there on the old
Overture system could you get for under $.10 that still delivered
significant amounts of traffic? From my experience we have a few... but
not many.

Second, and more importantly, (this has been gone over in every
significant marketing newsletter and more in the past few months)
marketers HAVE to stop measuring success based on traffic and start
measuring the effectiveness of that traffic. Not which keyword phrase
drove the most visits but which drove the most sales or leads. Not
which keyword phrase cost the most last month but which gave you the
best ROI when traced back to an actionable item. It is Overture's,
Google's, etc., job to drive the traffic and it is our job as marketers
to place the proper value on that traffic to determine whether or not it
is worth it at $.05 or $.10. We have one client who is willing to spend
over $10.00 (yes the decimal is in the right place) because we can track
that click all the way to conversion... and we know how much one
conversion is worth in actual $ revenue to the client... and they are
getting a huge return on investment on that term over the last few
months. We know because we can track it.

Focus on measuring the results and making decisions based on those, not
making decisions based on guesses.

Oh and one more response to a separate comment, if a visitor to your
site isn't worth more than a penny... then either your targeting the
wrong traffic or your site isn't capturing the value of the visitor the
way it should be.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Josh Dahmes <> Marketing Strategist <> Ciceron
www.ciceron.com <> tel: 612.204.1919 x42

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Received on Fri Feb 28 2003 - 17:49:07 CST