by Jason Hahn
Google’s parked domain advertising activities have long been criticized, but the time may have finally arrived for the search giant to feel some sort of consequence for its gray-area dealings.
On July 11, Hal Levitte, a lawyer who advertised his legal services by way of an ad campaign through Google AdWords last year, filed a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, California. Levitte charges that his ad campaign for Levitte International received 202,528 impressions from parked pages. The campaign was run from June 1, 2007 through August 18, 2007. Of those impressions, Levitte received 668 clicks and zero conversions.
His ads also showed up on error pages, thanks to Google’s AdSense for Errors program. This led to 1,009 impressions, 25 clicks, and zero conversions.
Levitte is pointing to Google with charges of “unjust enrichment” by leading him to trust Google’s promise to place his ads on quality pages, and then turning around and displaying them on parked and error pages.
The lawsuit does grant that Google made it easier for advertisers to opt out of having their advertisements placed on such low-quality pages after March 2008 by allowing advertisers to opt-in to having their ads displayed on third-party sites, excluding parked and error pages. However, the suit notes it took four clicks to get to this option.
Overall, Levitte spent $887.67 on his ad campaign on Google, $136.11 of which was spent towards these ads on parked and error pages.
As expected, Google claims that these ad displays were valid.
Levitte’s suit is seeking class-action status for all AdWords account owners in the U.S. who have had an account during the past four years, so long as at least one ad impression came from a parked or error page.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if this was dismissed, though this story will be sure to ignite some confidence in other Google advertisers who feel incensed about their ads showing up on such low quality pages.
Google’s parked pages have always been looked upon with some hesitation and even anger by Web users and advertisers alike. It is clearly their activity that dances closest to that thin line between legitimacy and shadiness, though it has not garnered much mainstream press, if any at all. It also makes Google an easy target for the “hypocrite” label, as it endeavors to battle spam sites publically, while dealing with such lowbrow activities behind the scenes.
There isn’t likely to be a clean-cut resolution to this matter any time soon, so expect Google to continue profiting off of this gray horse in their mighty stable of advertising channels.
Sources:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080716-google-accused-of-ad-fraud-over-adwords-on-parked-domains.html
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209100234
http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2008/07/18/google-in-lawsuit-over-google-adsense-for-domains
Jason Hahn
e: jhahn221@gmail.com
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