Overture.com is a company owned by Yahoo!. Advertisers can bid on certain keywords in order to have their ads displayed when users search for particular terms. Overture set up a Keyword Suggestion Tool for advertisers to determine which keywords are worth bidding on. This tool determines how many times certain words were searched for during the previous month.
So WHY is this tool so important to domainers? Well, Yahoo! has a toolbar which a lot of people have installed in their browsers. What happens is, sometimes people make a mistake and type domain names into the Yahoo! search bar, instead of thier browser’s address bar. This shows up on the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool as a search for that domain name. So if, for example, 50 people mistakingly search for a domain name in a month, then imagine how many people are actually typing it into their browser.
There are a couple of things that can throw the numbers off, though, so make sure you do your research before backordering any of these names, since you may just end up winning one that turns out to be a dud.
When a name is nearing it’s expiration date, a lot of people may search for it with the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool, which will just raise its OWE, or Overture W/ Extension score. Also, if someone is being malicious, it could be possible for them to run a script that searched for the name they are trying to sell you a bunch of times last month, making it appear to have a high OWE.
Also keep in mind that just because a name has OWE, it may not get any extra traffic at all. At the same time, it could get a TON! I recently registered a name that had an OWE of 25. I checked the next month’s results, and the OWE went up to over 350! The name is getting a steady flow of visitors and is getting excellent CTR. So trust me, OWE can be very important!
My final piece of advice is if you are considering buy a name off of someone soley because of its OWE, ask the person if you can do a traffic test on the name, or track the OWE score with an Overture History Tool such as OvtHistory.com. If after a month or two, the name still has OWE, then go ahead and buy the name.
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