Attorney sues Google over poor traffic conversions arisen from parked domains

17/07/2008 - 3:15 pm | By Richard Green | Place Comment

A recent lawsuit has alledged that advertisemnts placed on parked domains are low quality and unlikely to convert.

Lawyer, Hal K. Levitte is claiming none of the his ads placed on parked domain names converted into sale leads, and that Google did not provide an easy way to opt out of advertising on parked domains, according to Information Week.

Hal K. Levitte spent over $887.67 on his Google Adsense campaign to advertise his legal services and $136.11 worth of his budget was spent on ads for parked domains and error pages. He recieved a total of 202,528 impressions on parked domains leading to 668 click throughs which resulted in zero conversions, according to the lawsuit.

According to the Information Week article, the lawsuit alleges that:

“Google includes millions of parked domains and error pages that have little or no content, and that result in practically zero conversions, in both its Content Network and its Search Network. Given the low quality of these parked domain and error pages, advertisers would not want to spend their advertising budgets on these distribution networks. However, Google designed its network in such a way that it was virtually impossible to opt out of the AdSense for Domains and/or AdSense for Errors programs.”

The lawyer apparently advertised his services before Google allowed advertisers to opt-out of domain parking. The lawsuit seeks class action status.

The article does not addresses the fact that conversion rates can fluctuate based on any number of factors and do not depend entirely on the traffic source/quality.  The conversion rates from other the other $751.56 were also not mentioned.

The lawyers website is http://levitteinternational.com. Not exactly an optimised landing page!

Further Reading

Domain Name Wire: Surprise! Parked Domain Names Convert For Advertisers

CNET: Google sued by Boston Legal. Is this the beginning of a new series?