Pay-Per-Clicks I - Overture Overview

Perhaps the biggest, most unique and effective PPC sites is Google's Adwords. But, of course, for everything good in the world, comes some headache. Adwords is definitely no exception to this rule! So let's focus on the simplier ones first.

Most PPC sites are fairly straight-forward in how they work: It is simple...you write an ad, you choose some keywords and then you bid on this keywords. Position of your ad is based on how much you pay. Best position goes to the highest bidder. This can be good and bad.

The good is that you know exactly where you stand, how your bid effects position, and you can size up your competition quite easily. Yahoo's Overture (http://www.overture.com) is probably the largest PPC site that does this on the web. For any keyword, you can view the current bids by using the keyword selector tools (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). This tool will also be useful when using GoogleAds later on.

The bad things about this system is that position is purely based on money, not relevance (more or less...editors can remove your keyword if it is too obscure). This is a disadvantage for a few reasons:

1) Writing good ad copy is not rewarded
2) Poor ad copy degrades the entire quality of the search results
3) Trying to compete in established keywords can be difficult and expensive as a beginner

Adwords works quite differently than this. We'll discuss this more in detail next time.