Overture.com Search Terms Report

To give you a taste of how cool the Secret Net Tools are (you have to contribute to get access to all of them), I've enabled your access to several of the simpler ones. Enjoy!

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Google (my favorite search engine)

Getting Started:
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Believe it or not, 11.13% of the people who use SelfPromotion.com support the site!

This tool is temporarily (I hope!) unvailable.

Overture just changed the format of their results, and I can no longer extract the bid amounts. Until I can find a workaround, the Search Terms Report is offline. Sorry!

Optimizing your pay-per-click bids

As many of you know, Overture.com is one of my favorite sources of inexpensive clickthroughs. While their bidding interface is decent, one thing it doesn't do is provide an easy method for finding out what all the bids are for any particular search term -- it just tells your the amount you need to bid to get position 1, your current bid, and what position you are currently in. If you want to find out more detailed information, you have to do a bunch of individual searches!

To remedy this, I built a handy Search Terms Report tool. You just enter all of your search terms, and the tool will do searches for each term and tell you what all the page 1 bids are, all nicely formatted in an email report!

The report shows you at a glance how you are doing, and makes it easy to find situations where you are overpaying (and can reduce your bid without changing your position) and where you have an opportunity for making a large jump in position for a relatively small change in your bid.

For example, consider the following report:

 Rank   Bids for Query [free promotion]
-----   -----   -----   -----   -----   -----   -----   -----
 1- 7    0.20    0.15    0.10    0.10    0.09    0.08  * 0.08*
 8-14    0.07    0.07    0.06    0.06    0.06    0.06    0.05 
15-21    0.05    0.05    0.05    0.04    0.04    0.04    0.03 
22-28    0.03    0.03    0.03    0.02    0.02    0.02    0.02 
29-35    0.01    0.01    0.01    0.01    0.01    0.01    0.01 
36-40    0.01    0.01    0.01    0.01    0.01     -       -

On page one of a Overture results page, 40 sites are listed. For the search term "free promotion", there are 40 paid listings. So you have to pay to get onto page 1. The top bid is 20 cents, and this bidder is paying too much. He could reduce his bid to 16 cents and still be in the number 1 position. My current bid (marked with the asterixes) is 8 cents. Since I'm in one of the top 7 slots, I'll usually be visible "above the fold" when someone makes this query (which is usually a good thing, except perhaps for very general search terms, where you might want to be lower down on the page). Note also that by increasing my bid just 3 cents, to 11 cents, I can leap into the #3 position!

To make life even easier for you, you can simply dump the text of one of Overture.com's downloadable reports into the form, and it will extract all the search terms!

NEW FEATURE: The tool now generates a lists of all the bids you can safely reduce without changing your ranking!

Tool Temporarily Offline!

PayPerClickSearchEngines.com is a good site that is full of information and links related to pay-per-click search engines.

This site was developed on a Macintosh, programmed in WebSiphon, and served by WebStar. The author, on those exceedingly rare occasions when he does think, indeed thinks differently.

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