Overture Australia & links to the Australian Overture Suggestion Tool... (further down)

Registration information and the 'latest' on Overture Australia.

By Chris Thomas

Overture has come to Australia. Briefly, Overture is the world's pay-per-click leader where you pay to be listed at their search engine. Top three results appearing at Overture will (significantly) also appear Yahoo!, nineMSN, AltaVista, Hewlett Packard and Ozemail.

The registration process is easy and fairly quick, although if you have a big website, Overture only allow you 90 minutes (1.5 hours) to set up your new account. For large websites, this could take some time if you're targeting lots of search terms...

How does it work?

Essentially Overture's system works like this:

Advertisers or merchants must first register with Overture Australia - (it's a bit gimmicky, but they're offering $10.00 worth of free advertising to start you off).
Once you've set up an account (which is easy), select key words or phrases you think most folks searching on the internet might use to find you. Obviously if you sell cars, you might want to select words and phrases like "cars", "auto sales", "new cars", "buy a car online", etc.

These are the key words that you're going to bid on at Overture Australia. Overture Australia has it's own "Overture suggestion tool" which will show you how many times various search terms were typed in during the previous month on the Overture network. From my experience, search term numbers at google are about twice the number you'll see on the Overture search term suggestion tool. See the overture suggestion tool by clicking the link.
Of course it's handy to know what other merchants are paying to be ranked at the top, and you can do this by checking out the merchant bid tool, click here to see an example of this.
Set the amount of money you're prepared to spend on a key word or phrase and decide where you'd like to rank. Your job is to get as close to the top of the rankings to get more targeted clicks.

The interesting part about this is that Overture Australia has a different bidding set-up to their parent in the U.S. who have a flat, across the board 0.10c minimum bid price. In Overture's Australian version, certain search terms have the minimum bid amount at 0.10c per click. Other search terms are 0.50c minimum, and yet others are $1.00!

However, they've based their minimum bids on American spellings! We Australians type in search terms like "search engine optimisation" (0.10c per click) not "search engine optimization" (er... $1.00 per click!). Check the difference in minimum bid price! There could be some bargains there.
Sometimes the best way to increase your return on investment (ROI) is by examining niche search terms. They might not receive as much traffic, but they will be highly relevant to the content of your web site. Using the example of "cars" as a search term, you may also want to bid on "holden cars" if you're a holden dealership, or "used cars" if you're a used car dealership. As you can see, with a little imagination the possibilities are almost endless.

*A quick tip! I'm always looking at my log files or site statistics to see what search terms people have used to find my site, and sometimes I've found terrific terms to bid on at Overture.
Obviously you have to think about your product and the different ways people might try and find you. Tap into the searches occurring in your industry and put your site directly in front of customers searching for what you're selling.
At my e-commerce website where I sell my unique sleep mask I use Overture's tracking code to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns. I simply copied the tracking code into the 'check out' or 'order completion page' and overture shows me when one of their ad's has resulted in a sale or lead. It's very powerful! If a search term you're using is costing too much (i.e., lots of clicks and traffic, but no sales), then get rid of it instantly.
The downside to all of this is that Overture Australia is requiring you to make a "deposit" of $100.00 to get started. I'm not sure why they're placing such a big "block" to registering with them, particularly with small businesses wondering if it's worth it. Your hundred bucks does go towards clicks though (which is a relief). A free trial would have worked better in my humble opinion. Anyway...
As Overture puts it in their own words... "With Overture Australia you set your own cost-per-lead and pay only for targeted customers, leading to a high ROI"

Personally I've been using Overture in the US for the last three years and its been invaluable to help penetrate markets over there. Ranking top three for lots of 'nichy' and inexpensive search terms has meant I've gathered US customers for peanuts.

Because Overture Australia is still in its infancy, it's definitely a good time to get the jump on your competitors here in Australia before they realise how Overture's pay-per-click system works, and before the bidding for the top three places gets serious. For a start, see the screenshots below to visualize just how important Overture Australia is going to be...

overture australia

Now see how they ALSO appear at yahoo Australia... spot the relationship?

I think the mere fact that Overture is supplying results to nineMSN should be enough reason for most Australian small business with an internet presence to sign up with Overture. NineMSN now claim (backed independently by Net-Neilson & Hitwise) that they receive 7 million visitors a month.

I think one of the reasons for this is that many new computers are shipped with windows as the operating system and the "home page" is automatically set to... you guessed it... nineMSN. Most people don't know how, or can't be bothered changing the home page to something else, and they use the search engine provided by nineMSN.

Given that Yahoo Australia now owns and runs Anzwers.com.au (providing content to searches conducted there), Overture Australia results will probably show up there as well.

It will be fascinating to see what happens in the next twelve months now that Sensis (Yellowpages, Whitepages) has officially launched its new search engine, although initial reports are that it's a bit of a flop already...

However, within less than six months of operation in Australia, Overture has managed to take over from Sensis to supply lucrative sponsored results to nineMSN. Poor old Telstra! The only serious competition for Overture Australia is Google and their adwords program.

So you can see how Overture Australia now has enormous reach across the Australian search engine market place. If you have an international internet business, there's no reason why you can't sign up on all of Overture's global websites and gather customers from nearly all countries.

Some last words of advice. If you decide to advertise with Overture don't get too carried away with being in the top position (i.e. number one spot). It's funny, but I think that being number two spot can be better.

People like to compare when they're out shopping and they'll often visit site number one and then on principle go to the site ranking number two or three. Remember that people use the internet to research (just like you!). It's also very tempting to get into ego-driven bidding wars with your competitors (& this can get expensive)...

I know it sounds silly, but Overture is sometimes like an auction where emotions can cloud your better (business) judgment. My advice is to have a better website than your competitors, one that uses little or no flashy graphics and distracting animations. One that provides useful information the the visitor. If you haven't heard the insider's web marketing mantra before, - well here it is. "Content is king".

Again, people go online not so much to buy products but to research and gather information. Your job is to provide the information they're looking for (without distraction), build trust and likeability into your words and messages, and encourage the reader (and that could be me) to feel comfortable in dealing with you.

Web Hosting Solutions

My feeling is that many Australian web sites are paying too much for their hosting. Just to explain 'hosting' for a minute - web hosting is an industry where web sites are allocated space on a server (like a big hard drive) which allows internet surfers to access the pages on a web site. This site (potted.com.au) is hosted by an American web-hosting provider called Lunarpages. I have to admit that I'm a bit of a convert after moving this site to them (it used to be hosted by an Australian Web Hosting provider called dnet).

My other web-site "hibermate" (it sells sleep masks of all things!) used to be hosted by another Australian hosting provider called oz-hosting.com. After they lost lots of emails I decided to look around for another more reliable hosting provider. It dawned on me that I probably didn't need to host here in Australia and I might be able to get a better deal in the US. After lots of looking, comparison and head-scratching I settled on Lunarpages.com. I'm very glad I did! Why? Well, read on...

I used to pay AUD$35.00 (ie. Australian dollars) per month with oz-hosting. That's $420.00 a year. Moving my site to lunarpages, I saved $280.00 per year and I get a world class hosting provider! The speed of my site (i.e. how long it takes for pages to load is just the same - if not faster). I paid a one off free of US$95.00 for a years hosting (currency converted = AUD$137.00). For that I get 40 gig transfer, 1 gig hosting space, 400 email accounts, no set up fee's, free domain name (i.e you can register http://www.yourname.com) - I can build my own web pages, access accurate web stats and more. It's cheaper, it's more powerful, it's more reliable AND there's no GST.

The only downside is that if there ever is a problem, it's going to be a pain to call them for support (if I have to). Given that lunarpages.com guarantee a 30 minute email support turn around I can't really see it as a huge hurdle. Anyway, if you're interested to take a quick look click here.

More soon on online payment gateway's! What does that mean, and how come it's an important subject?

Phew! Stay tuned to find out.......

Contact me...

chris@potted.com.au

Overture Australia

Some links to friends...

If you need website promotion for Australian conditions, visit my new business,
Website Promotion Australia