Overture and 3rd party bid tools - problems

[KeywordMonkey]

Hi

The 3rd party tool I use for bid management is warning users that there are problems connecting to Overture after the recent DTC upgrades (even though they did an update of the tool because they knew the upgrades were coming).

Anybody else heard of this? I've noticed that it hasn't been that reliable for a couple of weeks. Other engines are fine so I don't beleive it is just the software...

Cheers

[MrMackin]

do 3rd party tools call home?

[KeywordMonkey]

Steady you'll have the privacy-paranoid crawling all over this thread!

[Marcia]

If there are privacy issues that people need to know about, why not crawl all over the thread? Knowledge is power - right?

[KeywordMonkey]

I started a thread on possible problems with access to Overture's API for 3rd party bid management tools which had nothing to with privacy at all...above was a throw away comment...

To return to the topic, I take it nobody has heard of Overtue API problems?

[MrMackin]

for taking the thread off topic

[KeywordMonkey]

No problem Mr Mackin.

As a side topic, I agree there is an undoubted danger of third party tools calling home and recording bid change activity as a way of learning about keyword trends (which are expensive keywords, which ones advertisers seem to think are good converters based on them bidding competitively for them etc).

However I doubt this is done - it's a lot of data to process and using it to make a profit would be hard, with little / limited market demand for this data. Most advertisers, IMHO are not that sophisticated - and it's value would only be limited, anyway.

[tomslick]

I've heard this from many that I work with. Is this an effort by Overture to make life difficult for the 3rd parties? or are there really just problems with the API? Given the historical instability of the API, my guess is the latter.