Overture Defaulting to Broad Match; use OTU to your advantage

Overture Shifting To Default Broad Match

This has been a long time coming; during my time consulting as a core member of Overture’s launch last summer, everything from naming, to bidding, to listing management was in question around in the inclusion of multiple matching types. Sounds like Overture is now rationalizing their offering based on what they’ve learned over the last year, and that’s good for all of us.

Now, assuming that you’ve read the article, and understand terms like “head”, “tail”, and “negative keywords”, you might be wondering… “How do I make the most of this (for me, and potentially for my clients)?”

Fortunately, Overture implemented several of the features that I designed for last year’s release, including Overture Tracking URLs (aka, OTU). (You can read more about OTU from Overture.)

Warning: This isn’t for neophytes… though it ain’t that hard. I promise! 🙂

Okay, you’ve decided to broad match on “shoes” (from the Clickz example), and now you’re faced with a couple of new questions, including a) Which terms should I exclude and b) Which terms would be better left as Exact match (because it’d be cheaper, or I need to bid higher to be ranked 1-3, etc)?

OTU solves all of this for you, provided you’re willing to do some analysis.

In short, OTU automatically appends a number of parameters to the URL you provided to Overture (don’t worry, they won’t appear on SERP pages, you’ll still have your pristine marketing URLs) after a lead has clicked your ad. What’s added? Get ready for analysis love!

OTU appends three “name value pairs”, which are hardcoded:

OVKEY: the keyword you specified to broadmatch, e.g., “shoes”

OVMTC: the match type used to match for a SPECIFIC CLICK, e.g., “broad” (or “standard”)

OVRAW: *** the actual term the searcher entered ***

So, now, if you are willing to mine your log, you could find out that in addition to typing in “shoes”, users are also getting to you via “red running shoes”, “strappy shoes”, and “shoes for horses”, by comparing the OVKEY vs. OVRAW values in your web log for every click you receive. (SEMs, there’s a golden opportunity here to step up and automate this for your customers… wish I would have had time to do it myself…)

With that knowledge, you can build up your Excluded Keyword list for things you don’t sell (or clicks that don’t convert), and decide to Exact match for a greater or lower price (depending on the keyword) for specific child terms.

Be sure to review the Overture FAQ on OTU (say that 10 times fast) that I linked to above to understand its limitations, ways that it may break if you use a non-standard URL structure, etc.

If you like OTU, drop by my blog (http://www.buzzhit.com/buzzblog.html) and leave me your thoughts!

Tony Gentile

Internet Strategy Consultant

www.buzzhit.com

Posted in Uncategorized