Parked Domains

[myrateplan]

This is not necessarily specific to AdWords, but hopefully someone has some thoughts.

We're seeing a lot of traffic from parked domains. I'm indifferent if it comes from a site like (for example) cellphones.com, as it seems reasonable that people would type that in the address bar.

However, we are also getting significant traffic from sites like www.all-free-cell-phone.com/. There is almost no possibility that this would be typed into the address bar, and with an Alexa rank (not sure how accurate that is, but it is probably a decent indicator of relative size) of 4 million +.

We're now doing what we can to minimize this traffic, but I can't figure out how this traffic could possibly be legitimate. Also, is there a way to tell what search engine is sending the traffic from a specific site?

Thanks

[abbottsys]

....However, we are also getting significant traffic from sites like www.all-free-cell-phone.com/. There is almost no possibility that this would be typed into the address bar.....
Correct, but the site owner may be promoting this site in other ways :) Be careful jumping to quick conclusions about Parked Domains without measurement. Use adwords conversion tracking and then look at Parked Domain performance with the Placement Report. Parked Domains perform very well for us.

[thomas68]

Set up your ads to have tagging and browse your logs to find where your visitors comes from and from which ad / ad group. Then you can exclude sites that you think have low quality.

[Discovery]

I third those suggestions.

Run Placement Reports! Both Yahoo and Google offer them and exclude the offending sites. We do this daily.

In Yahoo you must be part of the "full analytics" and have the proper tagging on your site to get the detailed reports. And unlike Google Y! reports all sites, no summary line items like "domain name ads", Other, and Error.

There are some drawbacks to Google as well. We have sites such as KANSAS.com that we are not able to exlcude from running our ads, yet none of our clients can do business in Kansas.

If you find you are getting a large number of poorly matched content sites with your ads, go review their sites and analyze their content and match it up to your landing page. Perhaps you can identify a few keyword phrases that makes Google think their is a link between the two. Change it up if you can.

We have ads in the medical and Finance industry, yet we dont want our ads to run on bio tech investment sites, so we try not to use the term, investment, or bio (like CEOs Bio) or similar words in our landing page content.

Discovery