AdWords, Parked Pages & 3 Million Search Engines

[abbottsys]

Parked pages continue to perform very well for us. Our placement report for August (to date) shows ads were displayed on 2,000 URLs in the Content Network - of these, just 2 (Domain Ads and Error Pages) provided 10% of all conversions.

A quick estimate (by googling the phrase "This page is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy") shows there are about 3 million godaddy parked pages, and most carry adwords ads served through Google's AdSense for Domains program. Moreover, most also have a search box, which allows a visitor to search on any keyword and get a pure adwords SRP.

The net result - parked pages continue to be a top performer for us. What's your experience?

[Mel66]

We get good results from parked pages for the most part. Like you, they make up most of our content traffic and conversions.

Melissa

[PPC]

Yes, this is pretty much all of the converting traffic from the content network for us.

[Discovery]

We see huge swings in conversion rates for parked pages. With pretty high CPC rates we may be a larger target for fraud.

So if performance is so much better on pure parked pages then that begs the question.. why do websites with "content" suck? In theory they should perform better as the content is related. No?

But as most of us have seen, on average, this is not the case. Our ads appear on porn sites, game download sites, japanese animation sites, Russian poker sites and more, not just once in a while, we cull out about 150-200 sites each day and we advertise in the US only. Our services are not related, not even keyword overlaps. Seems to me google can make a pretty good assumption about what a domain name may mean to a searcher and deliver related ads, thus parked domain name ads work, but when it comes to actually analyzing a page's content and delivering ads?

Well Google either sucks at it or they are just asking us to grab our ankles.

Steel belted Fruit O the Looms anyone?

Discovery

[abbottsys]

Originally Posted by Discovery

..So if performance is so much better on pure parked pages then that begs the question.. why do websites with "content" suck? In theory they should perform better as the content is related. No?....

I think the reason parked pages perform so well is twofold:

1) google does a good job of matching ads to parked pages. Their AdSense for Domains program clearly has special ad matching algorithms for domain names. Plus, godaddy lets website owners add 4 tags to specify the content of their parked page, which helps google improve ad relevency even more.

2) even if the ads are not what a visitor wants, the parked page contains a search box, so the visitor can do a keyword search and get new ads. So, we have a kind of "search network" inside this content network. As we all know search networks perform well.

Parked pages have become a kind of "distributed google search network" with pure ad SRPs. And this search network has about 3 million members.

[PPC]

I think that parked pages are not "search" but the mindset of the visitor is much closer to search than a visitor from the straight content sites. Ads on content sites are more like traditional ads (newspaper, TV, etc.) in that they are not nearly as targeted as search and therefore conversion is usually much lower. Plus, there could be more fraud in the content sites in addition to the poor matching of ads to "relevant" content.