Google cracks down on made-for-adsense sites, but will this extend to domain parking pages? If we don’t police ourselves…
The internet marketing community was abuzz this past month as Google sent notices to some of its Adsense publishers informing them that their accounts were being terminated. The crackdown was against publishers with so-called “Made for Adsense” networks. These sites include very little content — much of it “scraped” — and the sole purpose is to get visitors to click on Adsense ads. Many of these sites were advertised in Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Adwords program. Advertisers would pay a few cents for clicks from Adwords and make a bit more when visitors clicked ads. Google’s theory is that this doesn’t provide a good user experience.
In this case Google was cutting off the revenue at the publisher side. It has also taken steps to stop advertising of arbitrage sites on Adwords. (By manually stepping in Google appears to be saying that it can’t solve the problem with technology and had to resort to manual methods.)
Is Google right? Does pay-per-click arbitrage and made-for-adsense sites provide a poor user experience?
Sometimes it does.
If you’re a Gmail user then you’re probably familiar with the ads Google shows at the top of Gmail. Here’s an example:
If you click on this ad you expect to find a company that provides same-day Nevada limited liability formation services. You also expect it to be a reputable firm that was featured in USA today.
Not so. If you click the ad you’ll end up at a domain parking page:
The parking page is hosted by Hitfarm and belongs to a company in Minnesota. (All of the examples in this article appear to be the same group and hosted at Hitfarm.)
If the ad read “Information about forming an LLC in Nevada” then it would have been more accurate, but the ad clearly tries to trick people into thinking they are going to a business’ site.
Here are some other examples:
You won’t find any comparison shopping at this parking page!
Notice the misspelling of “intelligence”.
Sorry, no 50% off webhosting offer at this site.
There are legitimate ways to advertise a parking page if it results in good returns to advertisers and doesn’t involve trickery. In fact, domain parking company Parked allows you to advertise parked pages on Google and Yahoo. But Parked won’t let you advertise them with misleading ads.
It’s misleading ads and games like this that give the domain parking business a bad name…and could ruin it for legitimate domain owners.
Isabel Wang says
I think Google is more worried about the advertiser (versus user) experience. A deceptive parked page might waste a few seconds of a visitor’s time, but it’s advertisers who suffer the real damage.
I was talking to a friend who inadvertently landed on a shady parked page. She wanted to know why its advertisers had the poor judgment of supporting such a site. So not only are these companies deprived of a decent ROI, they look bad in the eyes of consumers. It’s no wonder that many of them are opting out of Google’s content network. And domain parking will be much less profitable if there are no content network advertisers.
I’ve been reading up on the domains industry, and I feel like individual advertisers represent an important constituency that hasn’t necessarily gotten its fair share of domainers’ attention. In order for a domain monetization program to be sustainable, it has to create marketing venues that advertisers actually like being a part of.
Editor says
I left out the advertising ROI angle in this article on purpose. I wrote it at first and then deleted it.
Presumably people are finding sites worth visiting when landing at these parked pages; that’s why they’re clicking through. If they aren’t finding those sites then they aren’t clicking through and this person will stop advertising them on Google.
Do you agree?
Isabel Wang says
Two issues:
1. Not all clicks have equal value. When a visitor lands on a parked page, he may choose to exit through one of the sponsored links instead of the “back” button. This doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a likely buyer for the advertiser’s product.
For instance, if you go to http://www.ukcolo.com (parked page at GoDaddy), you’ll see ads for bed and breakfasts in Colorado instead of data center space in England. While a British server owner might possibly consider vacationing in Denver, he’d probably click more out of idle curiosity than specific desire to buy. Based on my ad buying experience, such clicks result in an immediate exit rate of almost 100% – ie, no ROI for the advertiser.
2. Advertisers don’t have the ability to stop advertising on specific parked domains. They rely on Google/Yahoo! and domain parking services to match their ads with synergistic audiences. If they’re unhappy, their only recourse is to stop advertising on content networks altogether.
Unfortunately there isn’t always perfect alignment between “most synergistic” (what advertisers hope for) and “largest volume of high paying clicks” (what domainers want). But there has to be some balance (which Yahoo! is trying to achieve with variable pricing), because every disenchanted advertiser represents a lost revenue source for parked domains.
Editor says
I mostly agree with what you’re saying. Yahoo is adding variable pricing and Google already has it, so perhaps this ROI will be taken into consideration.
In the standard content network you can stop advertising on a particular site, but I don’t think you can do this with particular parked domains.
I’ve used Fabulous’ ppc service, ROAR, and had good results with some of my ads. Unfortunately they don’t let you see which domains your ads are shown on so that you can turn off poorly performing domains.
Robert Haastrup-Timmi says
I think there is still a lot of confusion on the value of parked pages and the potential opportunity to advertisers.
If I enter the keyword “Personal Loan” and reach a parked page with links to loan providers, that would not bother me at all. I would see that parked page as a niche directory for loans, therfore I would imagine the advertiser should receive a higher ROI.
At the moment, most google advertisers don’t get it and do not understand the value of parked domains. Perhaps one day advertisers will simply start to by pass google adsense altogether and place their ads directly with parking page companies…now that would be very interesting indeed!
The internet does not start and end with Google and Yahoo, Parking companies need to start thinking seriously about leveraging the unique marketing opportunity they provide by going directly to advertisers.
Editor says
Robert, I generally agree with your sentiment. But a couple points:
1. If you saw an ad that said “Personal loans from 1.9%” and clicked, which is similar to what these ads I reference are doing, you would be rather upset. If you did click through to an advertiser you might think they are offering loans for 1.9%.
2. Technically Google’s smart pricing does take into account the value of the parked page. If the ROI for advertisers on a parked page is high then they’ll pay a higher per-click charge.
Richard Ball says
@Isabel, FYI, you can now block parked domains on Google AdWords. Also, Google distributes parked domain ads on both its search and content networks.
@Robert, I agree that generic keyword domains could be just as valuable as search keywords. Whether you type “personal loan” in a search box or navigate directly to personalloan.com (if that is a parked page), you’ll see the same PPC ads. Presumably, there’s the same intent. However, if you look at all of the examples from this post (great post, BTW) they are clearly not type-in domains. That’s a problem for legit domainers. PPC advertisers see garbage traffic from low quality parked domains and assume they’re all garbage. I know I used to.
Shelley Ellis says
I just posted a message about this on WebMasterWorld.com and on my blog. As of today, my new AdWords placement reports have blocked me from seeing which domain parking pages are showing my ads therefore blocking me from excluding them from my content campaigns. All the PR and news releases about Google purging the MFA websites may have been great for their image (and yes, I’m VERY happy that Google is doing that for us!) but it doesn’t fool anyone who keeps a close eye on their content advertising with Google Adwords.
Aaron Pang says
I definitely agree with you there. It seems like the temporary antidote to get away with PPC advertising is to start writing some decent ads rather than fooling the whole world!! ~~
Editor says
Shelley, you can use a program like xtreme conversions to find out exactly where your clicks and conversions are coming from:
http://tinyurl.com/26rn7h
(yes, that’s an affiliate link. you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to, but I use this program and definitely vouch for it)
Brian says
Hi Shelley,
I’ll admit.. most of the content network traffic isn’t that good.
That’s why its important to track which of these content network sites are bringing in the most sales.
My website has some pretty cool reporting features on which adsense sites generated you the most sales from your Google Content Network ad.
It tells you the exact keyword phrases resulted in a sale. Then you can make informed decisions about your PPC account.
If you are an affiliate marketer, it works great because Google Analytics can’t do this.
If interested, visit
http://www.keywordradar.com/product.html?src=blog
Best of luck
Brian