WE ARE PAYING TOO MUCH TO OVERTURE!!

By Karen Fegarty
Posted Friday, October 22, 2004

I recently ran a report using GoodKeywords and was shocked at what I found. It only takes one cent to out bid your competitor, yet many of us are bidding much over to get that higher position.

Here is what I found for just 4 of the keywords that I bid on:

Keyword - Domain Hosting
Top bid - $6.02
Bid # 40 - $0.33
Had everyone bid just one cent to outbid their competitor the top bid would have been $0.74.
Savings to top bidder - $5.28 per click
Clicks on this keyword per month - 21030
Overpayment to Overture - $111,038.40 per month
**One company actually paid $2.52 more to reach position 3 instead of position 4. One cent would have worked!**

Keyword - Bulk Email Marketing
Top bid - $2.34
Bid # 40 - $0.05
Had everyone bid just one cent to outbid their competitor the top bid would have been $0.46.
Savings to top bidder - $1.88 per click
Clicks on this keyword per month - 14993
Overpayment to Overture - $28,186.84 per month

Keyword - Email Marketing
Top bid - $5.82
Bid # 40 - $0.32
Had everyone bid just one cent to outbid their competitor the top bid would have been $0.73.
Savings to top bidder - $5.09 per click
Clicks on this keyword per month - 32296
Overpayment to Overture - $164,386.64 per month

Keyword - Bulk Email
Top bid - $4.99
Bid # 40 - $0.14
Had everyone bid just one cent to outbid their competitor the top bid would have been $0.55.
Savings to top bidder - $4.44 per click
Clicks on this keyword per month - 40423
Overpayment to Overture - $179,478.12 per month

For just these 4 keywords, alone, we overpaid Overture by $483,090 in just one month. Let's use the proper tools and common sense to optimize our keywords. Stop throwing money to Overture and other Pay-per-click search engines and let's keep more money in our pockets.

About the Author
Karen Fegarty is with MailWorkZ. MailWorkZ, (http://www.mailworkz.com) is a leading producer of emarketing products and tools. Karen is using GoodKeywordsPro (http://www.mailworkz.com/cgi-bin/tracking/t.cgi?goodkey) weekly to make sure MailWorkZ is not paying too much for their positions in Pay-per-click search engines. She can be reached at mailto:karen@mailworkz.com