Why advertise non-existent site?

Someone must be paying for the ads ...

[malachite]

Just curious, but why on earth would someone pay for ads on the search network which lead to a site which hasn't even been uploaded yet?

An ad I just clicked on shows the correct URL, but the page displayed is an Apache 2 test page, telling me if I am the owner of www.example.com, I should now upload some content to the site.

Presumably, www.example.com is still charged for clicks on its ad?

[Terabytes]

Just wanted to add to this...and a thought... 8-)

perhaps the campaign is being run by someone other than the real owner thats saying "yeah, I got it under control...we'll get you out there FAST!"

...and forgetting to cross some T's and dot some serious I's.

I think its sort of like the stupid emails I get "You can get your message sent to #*$!xx thousands of people" with a link to some non-existant site...

I think they get the cart before the horse...
or, they simply have no clue what they are doing..
it seems obvious that it may be the latter..

but sometimes people rely on others to get the job done, and the "others" fall short...

(It's hard to get good help....lol)

Have a great holiday!
Tera

[Scruffy]

...they simply have no clue what they are doing...

Sound of nail hitting head.

Reminds me of the emails I get every day containing nothing but garbage, obviously intended as the carrier for something nasty but the sender seems to lack the ability to include the trojan, worm or virus cargo.

Probably has a connection with the (apparent) success of all those 'get 1,000,000 Adsense sites for free' ads on adwords.
(I make a point of reading each one;-)

[LifeinAsia]

Or there could be a fully functional site at example.com/landingpage.htm and no one at the company thought to set a default page for the directory or rename landingpage.htm to index.htm. But I agree- stupidity.

[sailorjwd]

Hey!

Give us stupid people a break!

Haven't you EVER mistyped a UR:l

Then 3 days later get an email from google that a landing page doesn't work.

Perhaps I'm the only one :(

[Essex_boy]

errm no your not, it cost 'Someone I know' (ahem) £300 or there abouts.

Just cant recall the mans name right now......

[jtara]

You want to see some small-y yahoos, do a search on "test" some time...

[ken_b]

I had this from a print ad last week. went to the site listed only to find no real site existed yet.

Why put it in the ad? Lead time for the print ad and failure to meet a deadline for the site to go live I suppose. Still frustrating.

[deep_alley]

Well while there is a strong possibility of some one putting a wrong url in the ad, there also could be the chance that the page is suddenly non functional for some reason and the URL has not been changed in the ad which is just as bad cause it means that the advertiser hasnt realised this and not made necessary changes.