Overture service levels in the USA

[KeywordMonkey]

Looking to run a US Overture account, and I know the service levels differ from in the UK.

I believe from old forum postings it's:

Basic - do everything yourself online
Bigger spender - help from Overture's optimisation team and you can submit on spreadsheets

Is this acurate?

[AussieWebmaster]

Looking to run a US Overture account, and I know the service levels differ from in the UK.

I believe from old forum postings it's:

Basic - do everything yourself online
Bigger spender - help from Overture's optimisation team and you can submit on spreadsheets

Is this acurate?

There are actually two stages of assistance depending on spend... Platinum and Diamond.
Both offer help with creatives and keywords, both allow spreadsheet submissions - the Diamond level attempts to get one or tow regular editors to work on the submissions so they know the site and what would be acceptable and speed the process a little - though not much.

[eschulma]

We are at the Platinum level. It's very nice in that if you have a problem you call and get an immediate answer, no waiting, from the Platinum Team. We've also been offered things like a 3 month free trial of the Search Optimizer, and someone there also offered to help personally optimize our keywords (which I never got around to taking advantage of, partly because I feel we already have a good handle on that), so while I mostly see that as their upselling effort it's flattering. Supposedly any changes to our ads will be reviewed and approved more quickly, this seems to be true.

As you probably already know you need to have a minimum spend over a certain amount of time to get Platinum. Promotion is automatic, no extra cost. Diamond is more money, invitation only. You get a personal account rep at that level. However, I was told that if you do that *only* the personal account rep can touch your account, and their hours are shorter than the Platinum Team, so if you call with a problem after hours the Platinum guys can only forward the message to the Diamond rep. Someone posted that they agreed to go to Diamond and regretted it.

[Nacho]

As much as I love Google for the traffic it brings, conversions and ROI, the level of service from Overture is just unparalleled. However, first you must define what "service levels" means at any spending level.

For example . . .

Every year I get invited to a refresher crash course for one day that I love to attend because no matter at what level you consider yourself (begginer, intermediate, advanced) you will always learn something new about their products, as well as its great for networking with the Overture folks.

Was this something said upfront in writing as part of the two options?

From what I've seen, Overture continues to exceede my expectations, even though we all know they have a lot of places for improvement. We also know they will continue finding ways to spot those as well.

[eschulma]

When is the refresher course? Is it only for California residents?

[Nacho]

When is the refresher course? Is it only for California residents?
I don't know exactly how it works to get invited, I'm sorry. I receive an invitation every year to what they call "Overture User Group Workshop" and I try not to miss any of them. It is very worth it spending the day with them.

[eschulma]

I'm mostly curious as to when it is -- I think I could probably get an invitation if I asked, although who knows. I assume it's in California though, which is a bit of a trip for me.

[AussieWebmaster]

I don't know exactly how it works to get invited, I'm sorry. I receive an invitation every year to what they call "Overture User Group Workshop" and I try not to miss any of them. It is very worth it spending the day with them.
That one I have missed though I have been invited to the Ad Council meetings.

[Mary OBrien]

If you are interested in learning more about the best ways to run and optimize your Overture account, you can register for one of the Advertiser Workshops that are taking place around the US in 2005.

Sessions are available in:

San Jose - March 8
Los Angeles - March 10
New York - April 19
Chicago - April 21
Boston - May 17
Atlanta - May 19
Washington DC - June 21
Denver - June 23
Philadelphia - July 19
Orange County, CA - July 21
San Diego - August 23
Los Angeles - August 25
Detroit - Sept 20
Seattle - Sept 22
New York - October 11
Chicago - October 13
Boston - Nov 8
San Francisco - Nov 10
Dallas - Dec 6
Orange County, CA - Dec 8

And you can learn more and sign up for any of these events here: http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ac/aw.jhtml

You must be a current Overture advertiser to participate. It's $199 for one session and $348 for the whole day. If you sign up early and attend the workshop, Overture will provide a credit back to your account, which lowers the cost for the whole day to $299.

Cheers, Mary :)

[sebastian]

I am sorry, but I feel the exact opposite about Overture and Optimizer.

#1 - The DTC and Optimizer are dog-slow applications that seem to have problems each and every day.

#2 - Most of the overture reps do not know their products very well and end up exploring problems right along with the customer. so many times i have called and illustrated a problem only to get a response like, "hmmmm, that is weird - let me get back you" ...and no one does. this is especially true with optimizer.

#3 - it gets so old each and every day to log in to make campaign changes only to be presented with a crawling tool requiring a plethora of clicks to achieve simple maintenance. there is nothing intuitive about either the DTC or Optimizer. the fact that you have to send data back and forth between Optimizer and DTC is a joke. they should simply share the same data sets.

#4 - every single time they have a "maintenance weekend", it only seems to introduce more problems. just today i get the same response from support, "we did an upgrade and seems to have broken some things"

who is responsible for engineering over there?

personally, i am down on PPC support right now. Google is bad too - but at least you need them less. their systems stay up 99.9% of the time while Overtures seem to have issues daily...

I am begging Overture - publicly - please fix your problems once and for all. STOP releasing new products, confusing names of products and additional functionality until you get your CORE products functioning reliably and properly. STOP with the 'weekly updates' that only seem to break more things.

FIX IT. PLEASE. For customers that have been with you for over three years, it's too long to make them wait for simple reliability. that's just a fact.

[Mel66]

Hear hear Sebastian. I was making minor changes to a handful of my listings this morning in the DTC. I lost count of the number of times I had pages time out on me and freeze. Each time that happened, I had to close my browser, open a new one, and start all over from the login page. Granted, I could probably enter all my changes into a spreadsheet and send it to my OV rep, but that's double-doing as I still have to key everything someplace. This timeout problem happens every time I've tried to change more than 1 or 2 listings in a session. What should take less than a half hour ended up taking over 2 hours today. A total waste to say the least. Like Sebastian says, I recommend making no more "upgrades" to the system until basic stuff like this is fixed.

Melissa

[AussieWebmaster]

Sebastian I thought you were a proponent of Overture... nice to know it annoys you also.

Though I must say they have great International Reps and service people.
Sarah Nadel and Alessandro Colossio are as good as they get in any of the PPC companies.

[eschulma]

I must admit I've been much happier with Overture than Google, but I daresay that has something to do with our making more money with them... also, I think you get to talk to much better reps as a Platinum.

If you have the budget, go with something like Atlas OnePoint, then you hardly ever need to use the DTC directly.

[Discovery]

Wow Sebastian we must be living a parallel life. This is exactly my experience with Overture. Frustrating. Mainly because I know there is more money to be made there but I just cant get to it through their poorly designed products.

If their products and services actually worked and set up was intuitive then they wouldn’t need such a large multi tiered support system. I also found out very quickly that any question beyond what is it's purpose? and how much does it cost? gets an immediate "I'll have to escalate that question" response.

Google is simple to set up and understand. problems are few. When I do have a question I submit it online and always get a thorough, well thought out response within 24 hours. That’s good enough for 90% of our issues. We do have an account rep for more strategic or detailed technical questions.

I'm with you Sebastian, I don't like being an Overture pessimist! Please Overture, fix your ship, convert me back into a believer.

PS: I have never seen a post here by an Overture rep, have you?

[sem4u]

Overture UK today:

Account summary:
04/02 data
04/01 data
04/01 data
03/31 data
03/31 data
03/28 data
03/27 data

Great! Two 1st of April dates and two 31st March dates? :confused:

What is going on at Overture today? I can't pull any reports off as I don't even know when one month's figures really end and when the next month starts.

All I can say is that I am lucky that I work in-house (mostly). Otherwise my clients would be demanding reports...

OvertureRep - can we sort this situation out ASAP?

I will be informing support AND including a copy of this URL for the support staff.

Looking forward to better communications and some answers from Overture/Yahoo.