|
Do you know about Overture’s Auto Settlement Policy?
October 7, 2004
Effective as of July 26th, Overture initiated their Auto Settlement policy and your continued use of Overture constitutes acceptance of the modified Advertiser Terms & Conditions. The new policy was inserted into Overture’s Advertiser Terms & Conditions published on June 5, 2004, referenced in the May Overture News advertiser newsletter, and also appeared in a message on the Account Summary page of the DirecTraffic Center®.
Don’t feel bad if you didn’t notice the new policy because Overture is not exactly bragging about the news. That’s because it makes advertisers responsible for Overture’s inability to turn off partner engines quickly during a surge of traffic. “Overage charges,” as they are being called, are accrued when an advertiser’s fixed budget runs out, but Overture still takes anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to pull the listings off its site and partner sites. Any charges that happen during that mysterious timeframe are now your responsibility, regardless of your fixed budget.
SageRock wanted to report on this policy because any business with an Overture account could be negatively impacted, even if you have a small fixed budget. Recently, one of our advertisers suffered under this policy. They were on a fixed budget and went through an average of $25/day in the positions we were regularly managing for them. Then a major news announcement broke in their industry and traffic skyrocketed -- taking our client’s average daily spend from to $25 to $2000/day in less than 15 minutes. When the client’s budget ran out (within an hour), Overture was unable to turn off listings quickly. The Overage charges were actually double the client’s allotted monthly budget! This development was our client’s responsibility, not Overture’s, thanks to the new policy.
Now, to Overture’s credit, they did offer to refund half of the Overage charges because of the special case of industry news contributing to the problem. But even paying half was a decent chunk of change for this small business. And it certainly didn’t make any of us feel better about the “fixed” budget renewing the next month, knowing what we do now – that “fixed” is not really “fixed” if Overture can’t switch off listings fast enough to keep pace with a traffic surge.
As a reference, here’s how Overture is wording the new policy:
“We’re confirming Overture’s policy that advertisers are responsible for payment of all valid clicks on their listings, including those that are received in the short time between when your account balance reaches zero and when listings are taken offline. Under this policy, if you receive clicks during this time period, any funds added to your account will first be applied to the negative balance, and the remaining balance will be available to pay for receiving additional traffic from Overture.”
Buyer Beware.
If you liked this article, consider signing up for our information newsletter. All of our articles come directly from our newsletter we send out every other week on Tuesday. Consider signing up. It's free and easy.
Subscribe to SageRock.com Killer Web Marketing Newsletter by entering your email address in this form and click "Join"
|
