False advertising? Weirdness...

A small rant about shady advertising

[Ducain3]

You know the Google rule that states that you can't try to manipulate people into clicking your Adsense ads?

Sure you do.

I've seen people post on this forum that the advertisers are real people who have to spend money each time a user clicks on an ad, and that's true.

The thing is, I'm running into what seems to be almost the exact opposite of this type of thing on my site. I've been seeing ads for products (sorry, but I don't think the admins would like me to be specific) that aren't available, or just plain don't exist. When I've typed in the url to the site (READ- I didn't click on the ad), it has taken me to a site about surveys or somesuch thing.

Let's say you have a site about movies, and I advertise saying, "Script for Matrix 4 Released!" just to get you to come to my site and take a survey, then in my eyes I'm lying to you. You're expecting something from this click that you aren't going to receive.

To me, this kind of thing is as shady as people who try to generate clicks by improper means.

Don't get me wrong, I still get paid when my users click these ads, but I can see my users saying, "This is stupid. I click these ads looking for real product info only to find this crap."

Those of you who advertise on Adwords (I don't), can you tell me whether or not this is an accepted practice?

Bleh.

[woodrow222]

Yup, just like these ebay affiliates are somehow allowed to advertise "buy dead popes here".

[MediaSpree]

Its not accepted practice. You could always add them to your competitive ad filter so they don't show up on your site. Google should do more human policing but I think they trust their automation so much.

[dmorison]

It is obvious that Google have just as hard a time policing AdWords as AdSense - just look at some of the stuff you can get on eBay if you believe the AdWords.

AdWords has an API and power-posting implementation that lets you upload 1000's of ad / keyword combinations in minutes; and in keeping with the AdWords headline of "start gaining new customers in 15 minutes" those ads run on the network immediately (albeit with reduced delivery) until a human gets around to reviewing it.

[arran]

those ads run on the network immediately (albeit with reduced delivery) until a human gets around to reviewing it.

But not on the content network. The ads Ducain3 talks about must have passed human review.

[ownerrim]

"buy dead popes here".

similar to "best selection of severed heads"

[sailorjwd]

I must have emailed eby 12 times asking where the new and used virgins were.. I could never find them after clicking the ad.

[ArtistMike]

I am sure some of you know that there is a command in ADWORDS that plugs in any searched for phrase into your ADWORDS ad. So if someone searches for "severed heads" that is what will turn up in the ad if that phrase is in the advertiser's list of keywords.

That command is maybe not widely known of, but it was found by me -- for free -- on a web site about Adwords.

ArtistMike

[PatrickDeese]

That command is maybe not widely known of, but it was found by me -- for free -- on a web site about Adwords.

That code was posted here in June, 2003:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[woodrow222]

Would this not be considered spam?

People that use this code should be shot.

[robsynnott]

I seem to remember seeing an ad to "download over a billion movies for free". Indeed.