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| Mortgage Marketing - Overture |
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| Written by Administrator | |
| Wednesday, 10 November 2004 | |
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Overture is very much like Google which we covered in the previous two articles. They are both pay per click based search engines. Google gets much more traffic itself, but Overture basically covers the remaining 40% of the search market through partner relationships so you should use both Google and Overture. There are other companies out there such as Searchfeed, but they are really not worth your time unless you have time to burn. Google and Overture will be a good portion of your online marketing budget for mortgage leads. Overture cuts through the uncertainty that you have when using Google Adwords. With Google you are not quite sure what you are paying for every click and you are not quite sure what your competition is and what they are bidding per click. Google is intentionally fuzzy in this regard and it can be a little annoying. Overture is not fuzzy. You can see exactly what your competition is paying per click and you can adjust your bids accordingly. In some competitive fields webmasters adjust the Overture bids at least on a daily basis. Some even use software to help them stay on top of their competition. If you already signed up with Google and followed their signup procedure, then signing up at Overture will not be a problem. You can see an overview of Overture's features at http://www.overture.com/d/USm/ays/. When selecting keywords for Overture, it is more important to find relevant terms than with Google. Overture uses human editors to make sure that the terms you are bidding on are related to the web site you are attempting to drive traffic to. For example you can not bid on the term "Beanie Babies" if your web site is focused on Colorado mortgages. Overture also has a conversion tracking tool and you REALLY need to use this. Overture's reporting page is much better than Google's, especially if you are running different campaigns for different sites. Another feature that is nice about Overture is that it allows you to create different ads for each keyword that you select. This can be very time consuming if you submitted 200 keywords, but if you create unique ads for your 20 most popular keywords, it will pay off. Proof is in the pudding and you can see this by what others are already doing. If you go to a search engine and type in "Colorado Refinancing" you will most likely see several ads with that exact phrase. One aspect of Overture that I do not like is the lack of a budgeting tool. You must add money to your overall account at Overture and you are not able to set a daily limit on the individual campaign level. Because of this issue, there are two important steps you must take. One, only deposit as much money as you are willing to spend in a day. When you are first starting out, this is critical as you will not know how many clicks your ads will receive. If you deposit $1000 and you selected some very popular and expensive keyword phrases, you might just burn through that $1000 in one day! Two, Overture has a feature where you can automatically replentish your account from your credit card. Do not do this. You end up risking the same thing that I just covered in my first point. Falling asleep thinking you will spend $20 and waking up with your credit card maxed out is not going to be a pleasant experience for you. Overture.com has tutorials and the entire signup process is not very complicated at all. Much like Google, it should only take you an hour or so to get signed up and setup with Overture. Now that you have created Google and Overture accounts, you are well on your way to cutting your reliance on lead companies and building your own lead generation machine! This article was written by the team at LeadPortal.com. |
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 31 March 2005 ) |
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