Blocking Parked Domains in Google AdWords

Sometimes I wonder if this blog starts to sound a bit paranoid, but when you run your own business you start to realise how many unscrupulous folks out there are trying to help you part with your cash. And one of the biggest scams victimising online businesses these days is the business of parked domains, domainers and clickfraud in Google Adwords.

Marketing RightSite with AdWords

For RightSite, like many online businesses, one of the ways that we market ourselves is through Adwords. Anyone who has used the web has seen these little pay-per-click text (and image) ads placed next to search results and on the pages of many blogs and smaller sites.  These ads allow businesses a means for publicising themselves in relevant media and provide useful revenue to online publishers.  What many people don’t realise is that, at least in RightSite’s case, approximately 15-20% of the clicks that advertisers paid for end up being fraudulent.
In the past several years a whole industry has grown up to take advantage of google adwords that makes the hookers on Tongren Lu look positively saintly. There are many variations on this business, but the basic elements are:

• Parked domains
• Domainers
• Bots that make fraudulent clicks
• Naive or inexperienced Adwords users
• A revenue sharing model that provides Google with a share of all revenue to publishers and fees to advertisers

To take it from the top, RightSite starting advertising with Google Adwords several months ago, and after it took us a few weeks of practice to figure out how to promote our site effectively using these tools, we started to see a significant number of clicks on our ads. In all, we have been spending about RMB 3000 per month on Adwords.
After a few weeks of looking at Adwords reports, however, we started to notice some highly unrealistic click-throughrates on our ads. In many cases there was one click per impression, and in many cases there were even more click than impressions.  We were getting ripped off.
Folllowing some investigation, we discovered that most of the high click through rate sites that were displaying our ads were parked domains. Domains that someone has bought as an investment and is leaving fallow while they wait for the opportunity to re-sell/extort cash from some poor chump who needs that domain.

The Basics of AdWords Fraud

If you read this post, you can get a complete explanation of the high click rates, but in short, unscrupulous domainers set up programs that click on the google ads — your google ads — on their sites, so that they can generate fraudulent revenue.  If they do this stealthily enough most users, and Google, never notice.  And, since Google gets a cut of all of the ad revenue from these fraudulent clicks, their motivation for stopping these shenanigans is limited.

How to Protect Against Click Fraud

The best way to protect yourself against click fraud is to tell Google not to show your ads on parked domains.  While there is a chance that you could generate real traffic from ads placed on parked domains, the quality of such traffic is quite low (high bounce rate, low time on site) and the risk of getting ripped off is simply too high.
This post explains how to instruct your Google Adwords account not to display your ads on parked domains. However, since Google changed the Adwords user interface a few months ago, a few modifications to these procedures are necessary.  I will do my best to explain.

Updated Procedures for Blocking Parked Domains in Google Adwords

While we still spend about an hour per week scouting through our Google AdWords report for fake clicks, eliminating parked domains has removed the vast majority of the fraud that we had been encountering earlier.  So taking these steps is definitely worthwhile.

In your Google Adwords account, choose “Reports” from the Reporting tab.
Create a Placement Performance Report as specified here.
Follow all the instructions as listed in the BGTheory.com page above, except that under the new Adwords interface, the navigation has changed.

The New Navigation

Opportunities

1. The BGTheory.com post above refers to a “Tools” tab in AdWords navigation. This tab no longer exists.
2. Now, users should navigate to the “Opportunities” tab. (Sound much more “market-ese” than “tools,” doesn’t it?)
3. On the Opportunities page, look for the Tools block in the left column
4. Click the “More tools” link to navigate to the Tools page
5. On the Tools page, choose “Site and Category Exclusion”
6. On the site and category exclusion page, choose your Campaign. (You should repeat this for all your campaigns).
7. After choosing your campaign, click the “Page Types” tab
8. Under “Page Types” tick the boxes for “Parked Domains” and “Error Pages”
   

   The Final Steps
9. Then save all changes, and you are done.

Presto!  You have just saved yourself some kuai and helped prevent a few domainers (and possibly a few Googlers) from being evil. Now if people will only tell their friends about this then maybe we can put a few domainers out of business and save us all some money.
If any of you know of more effective ways of preventing fraud, I would be glad to hear from you.  At the same time, if any of our users have questions, I will do my best to answer them.