Richard Ball emailed today to fill us in on the current issues he’s having with a large amount of Google AdWords Paid Search (not contextual) traffic coming from Domain Name Parking companies and how such traffic is garbage for his paying clients.
A whopping 72% of clicks for a single exact match keyword originated from the searchportal.information.com domain.
Investigating this domain, it turns out to be owned by a company called Oversee.net that owns DomainSponsor, a parked domain operation. Now, I don’t have a problem with domainers or parked domain sites.
What I do object to, however, is a situation where my clients opt into the Google AdWords Search network, expecting to pay for search engine advertising. Instead, they find themselves paying for garbage traffic. Let me emphasize that this garbage traffic originated from the Search network and not the Content network.
Question is, what kind of conversions, if any, are coming from this traffic? Is it hurting the all around quality and ROI of advertisers or just throwing it off a bit?
For those looking to stay away from such Domain Sponsor and other type in domain traffic, Richard adds a tip:
Until Google stops this practice of distributing search engine ads to places other than actual search engines, I recommend that AdWords advertisers implement one of the following strategies:
1. Turn off the Search network entirely
2. Lower bids to stay out of the top 5
3. Split ads into 2 campaigns: Google only w/ normal bids + Search network w/ lower bids
4. Request Google block *.information.com + *.domainsponsor.com
Again, Richard’s full post and copies of mails and responses from Google can be found at “Not Search Engine Spam“
