Google AdWords Sued over Low-Quality Inventory
A class-action lawsuit is in the works against Google over the issue of inventory quality. Attorney Hal Levitte recently filed a federal lawsuit in California, claiming that 16.3% of the clicks driven by a recent AdWords campaign to promote his law firm were from parked domains and 404 error pages. According to the lawsuit documents, none of these clicks resulted in conversions.
The claim is essentially that Google did not make it clear to Levitte that his firm’s ads would be appearing on low-quality pages, and provided no easily-accessible means of opting out of appearance on such pages. Because this same situation has applied to many AdWords advertisers, Levitte is seeking class-action status for the suit.
The predicament in which Levitte and other AdWords advertisers find themselves can be summarized as “reach without quality”. The vast size of Google’s Content Network ensures that an AdWords advertiser can generate high volumes of impressions very quickly. But a high proportion of these impressions are likely to be on low-quality inventory, leading to low conversion rates and negative perceptions of one’s brand. Worse still, it is difficult to ascertain which impressions were of low quality, due to a lack of network transparency.
While Google recently created a feature to block parked domains from one’s campaigns, the feature is buried within Google’s interface and difficult to access. And this feature doesn’t solve the problem of transparency: even when this feature is used, one’s ads may still appear on low-quality sites and blogs without one’s knowledge.
This predicament can be resolved through the use of vertical ad networks, which provide “reach with quality”. Examples of vertical ad networks can be found in Adify’s networks list.