Overture, is it worth it anymore?  As pay per click becomes more expensive, does it pay?     By John Bolduan RealWebMarketing.com

I remember when the Overture pay per click search engine came out a few years ago and made higher rankings possible by a paid click. It wasn't a new concept, but this one was one of the first with this new business model. The original name was Goto.com and it was a nice service to jumpstart some traffic when nothing else would do at the time. Well, as time passed everyone thought this was a good idea and th ding prices for keywords went up dramatically. No longer was it a no brainer, but you had to seriously consider whether it was going to deliver the traffic and then convert to an online sale.

When som s now go as high as $10 per click, there has to be a way to measure how effective it really is. I would say in most cases, the paid click model isn't as good as people think it is. One of the deceptions is that people see their website listed on the first page with natural search results. This makes them think that the exposure will convert to whatever they intended in the first place. You must understand that searchers don't give the same weight at all to pay per click advertising as they do natural search results. In fact, if people can see what they need in the natural results, they won't be clicking on the paid results at all. It's when natural search results don't deliver what they want to find that people go to the paid listings. I personally believe that over 85% of clicks on a first page go to natural results, the smaller part goes to paid clicks and I'm not even saying 15%. So to get a sale online or the result you want, you will need to keep your paid listing very high and spens a lot of money. Most of the people I've talked to about this lack of return on investment are discouraged and wonder why it doesn't work better. Most of them get wiser and drop some of the Overture paid listings because it doesn't do the job anymore.

What I've found is that Overture doesn't pay for itself and it's not because I don't write good clickable ads that generate interest, I do. It's just that the cost is too high per click for the kind of customer that it delivers. It all depends on what you're trying to do, if you just want to get exposure and brand recognition with a budget, that may be one thing. But if you're a small or medium size business, you need to find other ways to generate income. My opinion is that Overture actually costs more than what you can possible take in.

Instead of spending thousands of dollars on Overture which bring little in the way of good traffic, try going with better natural search results like the kind we offer here. That is the only way you will beat the game of higher and higher ad costs while receiving better potential business online. Overture was one of the first and it has great name recognition since being bought by Yahoo, that doesn't mean it's a good deal, it isn't anymore.

Pay per click paid search is a big money maker for search engines, so understand that they want you to be effective with the ads and use them even more. Just don't go hog wild in bidding wars. If you do, you're costs could spiral out of control without a good return on investment. Be sober and think carefully about paying for this kind of search result.