Google vs. Overture PPC

[WhizClick]

I read an article in Jill Whalen's newsletter comparing AdWords and Overture PPC. I thought for sure the article would talk about how much better AdWords performed than Overture, but was surprised when it was the opposite (Overture performed considerably better than AdWords in this case).

Other than the fact that my AdWords campaigns have FAR outperformed the Overture campaigns, one major disappointment I have had with Overture is the type of referrering sites I'm seeing...

http://www.411advertise.com
http://www.411oceans.com
http://www.411arbitrators.com
http://www.411scrap.com
http://www.411beanbag.com
et al...

I'm getting less traffic from Google with significantly high ROI. I continue to buy from Overture, but I'm wondering if I should move elsewhere (perhaps Business.com who has been contacting me).

Your thoughts / experiences?

-Tim

[seobook]

Overture does have some shoddy partners. Then again Google has a program called domain park. Usually with both engines you should get good traffic, but you will probably get some bad stuff too.

If your traffic totals from Overture are extremely low perhaps you are using too broad of keywords (Overture places exact match listings above broad match listings on actual searches).

[WhizClick]

Overture sends a ton of traffic and depletes my account pretty quickly... fortunately last night (after reading another post here) I disabled the Content Match listings. I didn't realize they are 'online' by default. I'm optimistic that the results will improve with only Precision Match online. However, there's still the problem of the questionable search partners...

-Tim

[Incubator]

Depending on the industry, we have always found Overture to do better then Adwords... at least from an exceptable conversion rateWc

[rbateman]

I have also noticed that there are HUGE differences in the results between the two. As I have a number of very different sites I promote, I use the two according to the published research and my own findings.

The research I have seen indicates women use Google more and Yahoo/MSN less. As I have some romance sites (books and cds) I focus my efforts on Google for these.

I have some Canadian sites and my stats indicate Canadian's prefer Google by a wide margin. So I focus accordingly.

I have sites that sell products exclusively to the US and particularly the south-east US. I focus my efforts on Overture here. But since AOL gets its results from Google, and my stats show we (my employer) have a lot of AOL traffic (education industry), I have to do both for this target audience.

Rick Bateman
seoworkbook.com