Overture  is considered the original pay per click program. Overture's top of page placement and the fact that you have lots of room for descriptive copy gives your ad writer more power to generate click-through.

In contrast to Adwords, which has remained stable, Overture has created new programs to complement its main PPC service now called Precision Match.

Similar to Google Adwords, you open an account with a credit card and you can begin choosing keywords to bid on. The account interface offers billing, transactions, listing management and report production.
The Advantage of Overture's listings are seen in Yahoo, MSN, CNN, and AltaVista and Infospace which means you might reach up to 80% of all Internet users. Your bids will have excellent visibility to a high volume and variety of targeted prospects. As a pay per click program, you can get free brand awareness because of the volume of impressions. Click-through depend upon the quality of your written offer in the link so they must respond to the benefits customers are seeking. You can place exact bids and know right away what your rank will be. If you want to appear in Yahoo top three results, you must have one of the top three bid positions. There is an auto bidding feature that allows Overture to handle your bids automatically.

Overture offers a keyword search volume reporting tool that helps find keywords that are actually used. Human editors review your keywords and your site. You may bid on a search term only if the web site has substantial content that is clearly reflective of the search term. What's new is Overture is now forcing clients to rewrite their ads if they don't maintain a certain click thru rate. The pages you want visitors directed to should be relevant to the query phrase. In the listings manager, you type your keyword phrase, title, and description along with the specific page for visitors to be directed to. Overture makes reports available for all of your approved phrases.