Update: Overture offers online marketing campaign tracking tool

Overture Services Inc. is now selling a service to U.S. companies that want to closely monitor the performance of their online marketing campaigns.

The Web-based service, powered by Overture software, is called Marketing Console and provides a variety of metrics through which companies can track the effectiveness of their online marketing campaigns, such as banner ads, search-engine generated ads, e-mail marketing and affiliate programs, said Stuart Schaffer, vice president of Overture Performance Marketing, the Overture division in charge of the Marketing Console service.

Overture is better known for selling context-based ads that appear on Overture partner sites. For example, a mountain bicycle company might pay Overture to run its ad when a user enters queries in a partner search engine that contain keywords such as “mountain bikes” or “bicycle wheels” or when a user visits a page on a partner site that has content related to mountain biking.

Companies do not have to be Overture advertisers in order to user the Marketing Console, Schaffer said.

A question mark that Marketing Console faces is whether potential clients will balk at relying on a vendor of online ads to provide objective evaluations of campaigns and at entrusting it with this data, said Gary Stein, a Jupiter Research analyst. “Small businesses and entrepreneurs are very protective of their online business information,” he said.

In other words, there is a real possibility that some potential clients might pass on Marketing Console due to conflict of interest concerns, as Overture would be evaluating the effectiveness of its competitors and of itself, he said.

“There could be hesitancy because Overture has a stake in the game and at the same time would be measuring competitors’ stuff,” he said. This concern over a blurring of the Overture boundaries is probably what prompted the company to put Marketing Console under a distinct business division, he said.

The Overture offering is one of various similar competing services currently available, he said. The Overture service seems to have a fairly complete set of features upon which the company can build as it continues developing and enhancing the tool, he said.

Demand for this type of service is increasing as more advertisers feel the need to aggregate real-time data to quickly tweak and improve their online marketing campaigns, Stein said. “So many advertisers are returning to the Internet, and they like that they can be nimble and maximize returns of their online campaigns in real time,” he said.

Its reasonable price is worth highlighting, he said. “It’s pretty affordable. It seems it was priced to attract small businesses, which are in general such devoted fans of search-engine marketing. The price is perfectly positioned for that segment,” he said.

The Pasadena, California, company offers three pricing options for the service, based on “leads,” which are defined as a visit from a unique user within a single browser session:

— $149 per month for that month’s first 40,000 leads; additional leads above the 40,000 cost $0.0037 each

— $199 per month for that month’s first 70,000 leads; additional leads above the 70,000 cost $0.0028 each

— $249 per month for that month’s first 125,000 leads; additional leads above the 125,000 cost $0.0020 each

Clients who sign up before the end of 2003, get a $50 monthly rebate for the first three months of the service. Overture plans to offer this “dashboard” service outside of the U.S. at an as-yet-unspecified later date, Overture’s Schaffer said.

Overture Services is a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo Inc.