Lawsuit alleges ads on parked domains are low quality and unlikely to convert.
A lawyer has sued Google claiming that none of his ads on parked domain names converted into leads, and that Google didn’t provide an easy way to opt out of domain parking, writes Information Week.
The lawyer spent $136.11 on ads on parked domains and error pages. He got 668 clicks and zero conversions, according to the lawsuit. According to the article, the lawsuit alleges that “Google includes millions of parked domains and error pages that have little or no content, and that result in practically zero conversions, in both its Content Network and its Search Network. Given the low quality of these parked domain and error pages, advertisers would not want to spend their advertising budgets on these distribution networks. However, Google designed its network in such a way that it was virtually impossible to opt out of the AdSense for Domains and/or AdSense for Errors programs.”
The lawyer apparently advertised his services before Google allowed advertisers to opt-out of domain parking. The lawsuit seeks class action status.
Although there is fraud on domain parking, this appears to be another manufactured lawsuit to milk Google for money. The article in Information Week doesn’t suggest how the lawyer’s ads converted on other pages. And only $136 worth of ads on parked domains is hardly a fair sample size. Perhaps he was advertising for a highly competitive topic with known high click prices, which would have been more susceptible to fraud. Or maybe his landing page wasn’t designed to convert well.
A possible outcome of this lawsuit is that Google may be forced to reveal more data about conversion rates on parked domain names. The company has marketed that parked domains produce similar results to other web sites in its content network.
As many domainers and people who advertise on parked domain names will tell you, lack of content doesn’t mean lack of converting ads. Many parked domains convert extremely well for advertisers.
Agreed. This is nothing more than a shake-down suit. Bet Google’ll get this tossed at the preliminary hearing…
Regardless, it gives negative press to domain parking.
its rather sad, that some corporates “get it”. They understand the power of direct navigation and use it to their advantage.
Some others just don’t “get it”. too bad for that lawyer.
Stay tuned…tomorrow I’ll be posting an article about one of my own advertising campaigns and how well it does on parked domain names.
The guy is just mad that he was paying google $34.02 for mesothelioma clicks. Laywers suck.
🙂
So this guy expects to get multiple new clients worth THOUSANDS to him for just $136.11? If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it… and the cost to acquire new clients would be much more as a result. What a joke of a lawsuit.
Funny stuff. No mention of the website ?
So advertisers have no fault in traffic that doesn’t convert ? Do they mention the conversion ratio of other traffic sent to the site? Of course not. . .
This is what I was referring to in my earlier posts a week ago.
Pay-per-conversion is where the online ad market is going. G**gle has a difficult strategy to implement.
Many of the parked pages that are typo domains such as Asprin.c*m convert significantly higher than generic domains. If g**gle removes the generic traffic, the high conversion/click typo traffic also gets removed.
Right on Steven. This guy is clearly trying to spin straw into gold, and was shocked that it didn’t work. You’d think if 1 conversion is worth $x,xxx+ then someone like google would get bit more than $136.11 in return for delivering a conversion worth that much. If it worked that well then bid prices for legal terms would sky-rocket, therefore correcting themselves to a point of realistic returns. Since this correction has pretty much already happened before this guy got there, he sould expect to spend a realistic amount of advertising dollars before getting the return he is looking for. Good thing he was a lawyer himself, othwerwise who else would have taken the case. $136 isn’t even worth going to small claims court.
mean to say “he is a lawyer himself”
He files this lawsuit and wonders why his ads dont convert? Hmmmm.
Update: I think this may be the guy…
http://www.lawbos.com/
Now I get it. He spent his extra money on running ads, not website development.
I’ve just posted details of the one Adwords campaign I run that I calculate conversions on. Our lawyer friend would be surprised by the results. See results here.
This is the type of guy who gives lawyers a bad name – cheap bugger filing a lawsuit over $136, got 668 clicks for an average cost of 20 cents each. You have to wonder what keywords he was advertising under, etc., it makes all the difference. Given he was only paying 20 cents per click for law-type keywords, they couldn’t have been very good words.
From the original article:
“Levitte spent $136.11 for ads on parked domains and error pages, which works out to 15.3% of his $887.67 ad campaign.”
So it makes me wonder how well the rest of his campaign performed.
What’s new with Scroogle. The are in the business to screw you and are doing a very good job at making megabucks out of fraud and deception. Google is the worst thing to happen to the internet since its inception.