Company Stealing our ad $$$

Greetings,

This is my first post here.

I watch my web traffic in realtime which enables me to see all IP addresses on my site, where they came from, ad word clicked, etc.

I had been noticing a while back a lot of clicks coming in through various popular keyword mispellings set up as domain names. The activity was different than that of user clicking onto my site via a Google or Yahoo paid ad click, though these were tagged as overture ad clicks.

More recently, I did an IP lookup on a number of the domains and came up with a company called ((URL REMOVED)). Their stated mission is as a Domain Monetation company. They take their domains and set them up as portals displaying prominent keywords in various areas. Once you click a keyword, the results are all advertising - not a single organic ranked link.

This company states explicitly that they own over 230,000 domain names, that the conversion per domain name is roughly $95 per 1000 searches. That is a lot of money in the course of a month/year.

Once I found the named servers and IP addresses of the servers of these fraudulent ad sites serving my Yahoo ads, I tried to block them using the new Yahoo domain block. Well, Yahoo doesn't block named servers nor IP addresses.

I had a long talk with Overture/Yahoo today and I'm really not satisfied with the end result, as usual.

This may be old news to some but I figured I would enter in the information on one of the worst offending companies stealing small and large business ad dollars. Hopefully you will find it useful to conduct your own research.

If anyone on this board has information on more of these offending Domain Monetization companies, please come forward. This is the next step in combating click fraud. If we band together, get the word and encourage action I think we can be successful in getting more qualified clicks.

I look forward to being a productive member of this board.

[ Message was edited by: bhartzer 01/07/2008 01:47 pm ]

Yahoo! and Google both have domain name parking programs...if you own more than 100 domains you can be a part of their program.

Basically, this means that the domain name is "parked" and the company is a partner with Google or Yahoo!, whereas ads from the PPC programs at Yahoo! and Google get shown on these sites.

If you're a PPC advertiser then this is just something you have to live with. Yahoo! and Google have partnered with people who have parked domains (what you're calling a domain monetization company).

If there are certain sites where you don't want your ads to display and then you can add that URL so that it doesn't display there...you have to do that in your PPC account.

Yes, I am incredibly aware of this. I know it is something I may have to live with but I am fighting it tooth and nail.

I was trying to alert people to a specific company whose name has since been removed.

The url/domain block is pretty pointless. You cannot block the root of the domains - the ip's or named servers. You have scan your logs and individually enter these sites. Once you have hit your max (around 250) that's it.

I am not going to roll over for this and just accept it as an additional cost of doing business.