Paid Ads vs Organic Search Results

Many people have asked what percentage of searches use ads vs non paid ads.

Total Search vs Commercial Search

Most search querries are not commercial in nature. To get an accurate indication of organic vs ad usage these non commercial searches are not counted. A recent Piper Jaffray report stated that 35% of search is commercial in nature.

Commercial Search Purchase Breakdown

Yesterday Niki Scevak of Jupiter Research stated yesterday that 5 out of 6 commercial search purchases originate from natural unpaid organic search results.

Overture Paid Inclusion
Yesterday at the SES New York conference Dan Boberg (of Overture) stated that Yahoo will be meshing its paid inclusion programs and branding them under the Overture name. He said we would be hearing more about it in the comming days and weeks.

Yesterday Overture also announced the release of Overture Site Match, which allows you to submit sites to Yahoo, AllTheWeb, and AltaVista for a $49 review fee and a category based cost per click of $0.15 or $0.30.

If your site already has great rankings for your primary keywords then there is absolutely no reason to join this program with your main pages.

Sloppy affiliate marketing has added tons of junk to search engine indexes. Overture (and Yahoo) firmly believe that using an incremental fee based inclusion program helps aid the relevance of their index. Affiliate marketing via search has essentially no cost. By introducing incremental cost to clicks, a search engine can improve the user experience. A site which is not properly targeted and smooth will not be hard to afford these fees.

Most affiliate marketers will not be able to afford these fees, and thus the index.

Got MILK Questions? Overture Site Match FAQs

Overture Daily Spending Limits

Starting in October, we're introducing "Budget smoothing", another new feature in which the Overture system makes adjustments to the frequency in which your listings are displayed based on the depletion of your specified budget amount. For example, if you have budgeted €100,00 a day, our system will display your listings just enough so that you receive clicks that will total approximately €100,00 for the day. The smoothing feature also regulates the display of your listings so that you receive clicks throughout the day, rather than burning through your budgeted amount in just a few hours.

From Overture Germany (not yet sure when the global rollout will occur. Will likely know soon...)

Overture Console Update
They now allow a daily spend budget, but I am told your account needs to be on autoreplenish to turn the feature on.
The new console shows what the ads will look like in their short and full versions and also makes some of the bid management stuff a bit quicker. You can update the max bid by category instead of doing it word by word. Overture's console is becoming a bunch more like Google's to where you can intuitively make many changes extremely quick. The additional combination of broad and phrase match makes the system quicker to use.

Pay Per...?
While still building their highly successful PPC model Overture also considers creating a flat rate pricing model.

Overture is also to place ads in RSS

Overture to Default to Broad Match Listings

Overture's new system will simply allow a choice between exact and broad matching. ...Overture advertisers were to be informed today about the change. ... An exact date for it hasn't been announced, but Overture says it will happen in the next few weeks.

Search Engine Watch has a good article explaining the new Overture broad match move. Basically the change makes gaining greater search volume easier, but more expensive.

time to go update my ebook, and about 20 pages of my websites...

Overture Search Optimizer

What is Overture Search Optimizer?

Search Optimizer users will be able to automate search campaigns based on those response metrics. It also lets marketers develop "watch lists" of keywords or campaigns and run campaigns only during certain times of the day. It will suggest potential keywords that could meet a marketer's business objectives. Marketers also can sort campaigns based on business objectives to see which are underperforming. source: DM News

Advantages of Overture Search Optimizer
Some of the advantages of the new tool are that it will allow you to:

• Optimize campaigns based on business objectives such as cost-per-acquisition (CPA), cost per click (CPC), return on ad spend (ROAS) and others;

• Automate keyword bidding based on performance-driven bid recommendations tied to their unique business objectives;
• Sort campaigns by performance to quickly and intuitively determine which campaigns/keywords need additional optimization;
• Manage thousands of keywords through features that allow them to develop "watch lists" of their most important campaigns or keywords, perform advanced searches of their performance data and quickly download large amounts of information to an outside application;
• Define active time frames for their listings.

source: Press Release

Cost of Overture Search Optimizer
A tad bit on the expensive side... $249 - $1599, especially when compared with similar tools by companies like KeywordMax (thanks AussieWebmaster type guy).

iProspects Bid Management Tools
Jumping on the bid management press release bandwagon iProspect filed for a patent on their proprietary bid management tool.

SEO Softare = Eventual Commodity
Some of the advancements for bid management tools will command some value becuase they save money, but most of this software will eventually become a commodity though and I find the current prices to be absurdly high.

Google and third party bid management software vendors will continue to inovate and and lower costs. In about a year the competitive marketplace wil expect similar software to be included as part of the advertising system for free.

note: we merged a few short posts into this one.