21 August 2002 | Author: Iain Macaulay
The Overture.com Match Driver Tool aims to capture leads to the advertisers site from misspellings, combinations of singular or plural keywords and practically every variation that might be used by someone looking for the related product or service. (Does this sound like a very expensive version of SEO??)
Overture today announced a 'major' update
with what they call an 'expanded matching enhancement' that allows the client to 'receive traffic from more complex search strings'.
The enhancement looks at the entered keyword, and the title and description of the listing, then try to match them to searches where the intent of the user was to find the clients service although they may not have entered the exact key word into the search box that the client is bidding on.
This effectively creates a new bidding marketplace using as a price gauge the maximum bid from the nearest similar term. The client with the highest max bid sits at position one and the next at position two. If position one is clicked on the advertiser will only pay one pence more than the max bid of the next highest competitor if they are using the auto bid function.
But it leads us to ask the question, to play in this market place, and ensure that we can get as much traffic as possible, will we have to start raising our max bids just on the off chance?
This approach will obviously drive up the prices of overture keywords without ever intending to do so?
It seems there is a slight flaw in this and once again we could see advertisers' budgets suddenly skyrocketing for no reason.
Is it really a good thing to second-guess anyones search intentions?
Plus, can we still measure the effectiveness of the campaign if people are not searching exactly the way you thought? You can have a log of the number of click through's and the number of purchase but a rather vague notion of how they got there.
Surely everyone knows how people get to their site so they can alter their marketing campaign to fill the gaps and track ROI. If you don't know where the gaps are how can you fill them?
Time will tell what the marketplace response is but the SEO industry is actually pleased with this move.
And, as expected, and backed up by our own research, searchers are seeing the difference between PPC and SEO listings.
Our Heather Luscombe predicted in Revolution Magazine way back in February that searchers are increasingly bypassing the PPC listings in search of what they see as more valid SEO generated listings.
Recent discussions and presentations by SEO professionals have backed up this theory.
www.overture.com
Changes afoot in the PPC world
Overture US launches its new enhanced Match Driver Tool - but is it in the client's interest?The Overture.com Match Driver Tool aims to capture leads to the advertisers site from misspellings, combinations of singular or plural keywords and practically every variation that might be used by someone looking for the related product or service. (Does this sound like a very expensive version of SEO??)
Overture today announced a 'major' update
with what they call an 'expanded matching enhancement' that allows the client to 'receive traffic from more complex search strings'.
The enhancement looks at the entered keyword, and the title and description of the listing, then try to match them to searches where the intent of the user was to find the clients service although they may not have entered the exact key word into the search box that the client is bidding on.
This effectively creates a new bidding marketplace using as a price gauge the maximum bid from the nearest similar term. The client with the highest max bid sits at position one and the next at position two. If position one is clicked on the advertiser will only pay one pence more than the max bid of the next highest competitor if they are using the auto bid function.
But it leads us to ask the question, to play in this market place, and ensure that we can get as much traffic as possible, will we have to start raising our max bids just on the off chance?
This approach will obviously drive up the prices of overture keywords without ever intending to do so?
It seems there is a slight flaw in this and once again we could see advertisers' budgets suddenly skyrocketing for no reason.
Is it really a good thing to second-guess anyones search intentions?
Plus, can we still measure the effectiveness of the campaign if people are not searching exactly the way you thought? You can have a log of the number of click through's and the number of purchase but a rather vague notion of how they got there.
Surely everyone knows how people get to their site so they can alter their marketing campaign to fill the gaps and track ROI. If you don't know where the gaps are how can you fill them?
Time will tell what the marketplace response is but the SEO industry is actually pleased with this move.
And, as expected, and backed up by our own research, searchers are seeing the difference between PPC and SEO listings.
Our Heather Luscombe predicted in Revolution Magazine way back in February that searchers are increasingly bypassing the PPC listings in search of what they see as more valid SEO generated listings.
Recent discussions and presentations by SEO professionals have backed up this theory.
www.overture.com
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