I signed up for Overture some time this month and I must spend at least $20 per month or else Overture is going to charge me $20 for nothing. So I need to find a way to spend $20 every month on my own clicks. I don’t think that is going to be hard!

Overture’s Account Screen

This is what you’ll see when you sign up. I have deposited $30 into my account and got a bonus $25 credit. Now if you notice my account is still “Off” even though I have paid money! Now I was confused for a few days. I kept clicking on “Account On/Off” at the “Account Setup” page and set it to “On” and clicked on “Submit”. Somehow, it keeps staying at “Off”! I got mad and emailed the customer support after spending a few minutes looking through the help file only to find the the customer support link is at the bottom of every page in very tiny text.

Overture’s Account Activation Procedure

It seems like the only way to activiate your account is to call a special phone number Overture sent you after you signed up. I igonored this email initially and the customer support sent me a similar email again. I replied asking if there was another way?

Here’s what the email says:

Thank you for signing up with Overture! In order to activate your account and begin receiving targeted sales leads, please follow these simple steps:

1. Call 1-866-230-5091 any time of day to access our automated account activation system from the phone number you entered in your sign up. If you are located outside of the United States, please call our main Customer Solutions number: +1 (626) 685-5700 during our business hours: Monday - Friday: 6 a.m.-7 p.m., PST and Saturday: 7 a.m.-4 p.m., PST
2. Enter your account number, found in the confirmation e-mail you received from Overture or the DirecTraffic Center®
3. Verify your account information as prompted, such as your credit card information and zip code (Please have your account information available to complete this step).

Once your account is activated and your listings are approved, you will begin receiving targeted sales leads from the Overture network of partner sites.

We look forward to helping you build your business.
Sincerely,

Your partners at Overture

If you’re in the USA, it shouldn’t be a problem. It is quite a chore for me because I have to be mindful of the operating hours. I might have to call late at night from Singapore to get them at that time. Right now its about 11 AM in Singapore and its 6 PM PST in USA. Seems like I have to pay extra to get this step done. This is the first time I have encountered such a troublesome procedure.

Overture’s Money Management

This is the most important part in my opinion. Overture will charge you a minimum of $20 every month. If you read the fine print, you will learn that you must spend $20 every month.

Furthermore, once your account balance is low, you must “top up” a minimum of $30. Again read the the fine print at the end of the page. (See screenshot on the left).

Like Enhance and FindWhat PPC search engines, you will be able to see the top bid prices and their positions. The more you bid the higher your ad will appear as simple as that. Be careful when you bid on your keywords because they will set the highest CPC by default with a minimum CPC of $0.10.

Overture’s Ad Management

Overture organizes your ads in “Categories”. All your keywords belong to this category and each keyword has 1 ad linked to it. If you’ve been using Google all along this is quite a shift because you now have to write 1 ad per keyword but you can use the same ad for all your keywords if you want.

There 2 main areas where your ads may appear. In “Precision Match” or “Content Match”. “Precision Match” are the search engine results pages while “Content Match” are other web sites that belong to Overture’s network. The “Content Match” is similar to Google’s AdSense network.

I submitted my ads for approval and some of them got approved in 1 day while others are taking the full 5 days to get approved!

Overture’s Tutorials

I would love to post a link to Overture’s tutorial page with a PDF Workbook for free download but that web site can’t be accessed at the moment so I will post about it when its up again.

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