NonConverting Traffic Coming From Google's DomainPark Program

Anybody else experiencing this?

[seth_wilde]

Our ROI tracking is able to separate content targeted traffic from regular adwords traffic and then breakup the content targeted traffic by domain name. With one of our accounts we've seen an influx of completely worthless traffic coming from Google's DomainPark program. Even though the keywords in the domains sending us traffic are currently being bid on in adwords, Google instead shows our ads for a much more expensive keyword, that could barely be considered even marginally relevant. To compound the problem we're also seeing our ads displayed on adult themed versions of these non relevant parked domains as well as click fraud from one of these domains.

I'd expect this kind of crap from a 3rd tier ppc engine that I paid a few cents a click for.. But it's very aggravating to see this coming from a ppc engine that charges top dollar. Google seriously needs to rethink their DomainPark program (or at least do more quality control) and give advertisers more control over were their ads are shown and how much they pay for content targeted ads.

[Brett_Tabke]

> DomainPark reminds me of UltimateSearch.

Exactly! I couldn't put my finger on it, but that is exactly what it is. And notice that google has banned most of US 39,000 domains.

> post a dedicated email address

Please do, but please do something with it. Other "dedicated" G email address tend to be bottomless pits.

[figment88]

there may well be some advertisers that want to advertise on a parked domain.

I'd be more happy than happy to advertise on parked domains - I just want a seperate market for it.

For regular content ads, I'm willing to pay about 60% of what I pay for search ads.

For domain parked ads, I'm willing to pay about 10% of what I pay for search ads.

Different advertisers will have different utility functions, but we cannot express them with a intermingled marketplace.

[Jenstar]

I agree figment88, parked domains is definitely a unique market, and shouldn't be lumped in with all the AdSense publishers. It will be interesting to see if anything changes about this - I agree with others that it could definitely have a negative impact on the AdSense program. I was pretty surprised to find out that they are all considered to be one program when it comes to the advertiser chosing what to participate in and what not to.

[webdiversity]

That's one of the good things about Overture phrase match, you can chose to bid much lower, to compensate for the quality not being as relevant (in the main) as a standard (read exact) match.

I'm sure plenty of advertisers would do DP ads if they were less expensive than searches that might appear on AOL for arguments sake.

I can report that the syndicated partner that was sending traffic to incorrect landing pages due to tracking anomalies have rectified the errors.

[loanuniverse]

From the point of view of a publisher, I have to say that there is no way that proper targeting can be made solely from a domain name. When I read that one of the advertisers that posted here was in a finance topic, it was clear to me that traffic would not convert as well as if the ad was targeted to the actual content of the page.

Every topic has a myriad of subtopics, and content ads are at their most effective when the ad matches the subtopic of the page content. I only have to compare my Adsense CTR and my affiliate CJ CTR to figure out that the reason why Adsense is many times that of CJ, and why only 1% of the CJ clicks turns into a sale is that there just isn’t any affiliate advertisers that are a good match for the topic of my site.

Sure you can get related ads directed at other types of consumers that fall within the big topic, but most people might click just out of curiosity. I have to say that this concerns me somewhat since it might prompt some of the advertisers to turn off content altogether.