Overture

Overture, the IdeaLab venture that pioneered the pay-per-click auction process originally under the name GoTo.com, also reaches a significant number of Internet users: 80% of the total according to the company. The majority of the volume is through MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and others that display its paid listings for a cut of the revenue. Overture.com itself attracts 6 million unique search users each month.

Overture PPC ads displayed on Yahoo.

Overture’s 100,000 advertisers have their listings displayed at Overture.com before any non-paying websites. Some banking terms have more than 200 paid listings. However on partner sites, such as Yahoo (screenshot above), only the top three or four advertisers are displayed on each page, leading to intense bidding for top slots.

For example, in early May the top four bidders for “home equity loan(s)”¹ were all paying about $4/click. Converting one of every 100 visitors would result in an acquisition cost of $400/loan.

Other financial services terms had even higher bids, especially anything to do with debt or credit. For example, the top four bidders for “debt management” were willing to pay more than $9/click (Table 5, right).

More targeted search terms such as “home equity loan(s) Seattle” had much lower bids, in this case just an average of $0.11 per click for the top-four spots.  However, geographic targeting doesn’t always result in lower CPCs. In the case of “mortgages yourstate” average costs for the top-4 bidders were 15% higher than for the unmodified “mortgage”.  

¹On Overture, but not Google, singular and plural versions are covered by a single bid, e.g., mortgage and mortgages return the same search results.

Table 1

10 Most Expensive Financial Keywords

average pay-per-click cost on Overture, May 2003

Source: Overture, 5/29/03

Yahoo, MSN, AOL

Advertising placed through Google and Overture will get you placed on AOL, Yahoo, and MSN. However, all major search engines except Overture limit the number of paid ads to eight or fewer per page of search results.

Table 2

PPC Listings Displayed at Major Search Engines

includes pay-per-click sponsors only

Source: Online Banking Report, 5/03

*Not all keywords display Overture paid ads.

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