Thrudigital

Since I have been a Google AdSense user for quite a long time (almost three years), I wanted to know how Google AdWords searches, in order to understand how advertisers view my websites. After I registered and paid a small fee, I was able to start exploring how it works. I tried to run a few campaigns, to attract targeted visitors to my forum, and to other pages that were selling some stuff. Everything worked well – I noticed some clicks, some conversions and I was quite pleased with how it worked. Until, one day when I ran reports and realised that many clicks came from parked domains, and that on many websites the CTR was excessively high compared to impressions.

Why is this a real problem and what does it mean?
I don’t mind paying for clicks that came from websites where my ads were shown repeatedly, as I know that these are natural clicks. These websites are usually either forums or sites featuring high-quality content. It is normal for such websites to receive thousands of visitors each day, and so I don’t mind, but why do parked domains generate such high CTR? Why did I pay for clicks on websites where my ad was shown only 2 or 3 times? There’s no great conspiracy theory, but the whole thing is certainly suspicious. Based on my own experiences, CTR does vary between 0.50% and 10% on particular pages. The more relevant content, the more clicks these pages receive.

In order to explain the problem of parked domains, we must understand why this business model exists. It’s nothing more than arbitrage. Parked domains’ traffic must be poor since they cannot rank well in Google (though I have seen some exceptions). Thefore, their traffic sources usually originate in PPC campaigns. Sometimes, CPM advertisements are also used to promote parked domains. Essentially, they buy traffic and sell clicks. It is very unusual to see a parked domain advertised in AdWords, though other advertising networks often perform very well for parked domains. All in all, these domains generate some traffic. Of course, this doesn’t answer the question why parked domains generate so high CTR. I tried parking a domain and in the end I received no clicks. So, there must be a problem within: I suppose that parked domains are the most common source of click-fraud.

Also why do some websites of low quality generate high CTR?

Again, I suppose that these are very common source of click-fraud. It’s very easy: I create a community of clickers, and we’ll click on each other’s ads. This is a quick route to a ban from AdSense, but for some people it’s the only way to earn revenue from AdSense. Some interesting posts on this subject can be found here. So, this is just another reason why on some websites your AdWords campaign “performs” well (a large number of clicks, but very few conversions).

After realising that I had paid for crap clicks, I started writing an email to the AdWords team, but before clicking on the send button I decided to give up. I lost only about £20, and there is really no need to worry about such an amount. I was very careful and conservative with my AdWords campaign and this proved wise.

Just imagine that I could achieve at least 20% or 30% CTR (these numbers are far from the average parked domains’ CTR generated within my AdWords campaign!) on my AdSense account. Put simply, I’d be a millionaire today if this were true. Instead of such high figures, I usually see CTR varying between 2% and 3% in my AdSense statistics. That’s very low in comparison to parked domains, isn’t it? So really, there is something fishy about parked domains or websites with poor content.

These are the reasons why you should target your AdWords campaign at particular websites instead of using keyword-targeting. You’ll pay more, but you can also be sure that such ads won’t prove to be a waste of money. It’s more profitable to get 10-20 clicks per day with a conversion rate of 10% than 100-200 clicks with conversion of 0.05%.

Be aware that if your conversions mean registration (free registration), you could achieve high conversion from ads shown on parked domains. Though you’ll no doubt be pleased to see such a high conversion ratio, these newly registered members could well be fake due to the existence of “clicks exchange networks” that are often based on the “behave naturally” principle. Simply put: these newly-registered people probably won’t return to your website, and they won’t buy any products either.

Google AdWords is good, but make sure that you know what you’re doing. There are some clicks that are just too suspicious.

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