We recently came across someone on Twitter who asked if parked domains that show up in Google Adwords search results can bring down your PPC click-through rate.
First things first, let’s define what a parked domain is and how it’s relevant to PPC. A parked domain is defined as a site that is undeveloped and belongs to a domain name registrar or a domain name holder. Google’s Adsense program places targeted AdWords ads on parked domains that are part of the Google Network. So, whether you’re running the content network or just search, you’re ads could appear on a parked domain site.
Apparently parked domains used to be considered a blank page that if a user ended up on they would have to retry their search. However, now parked domains that run Adsense could offer ads that can be relevant to a user’s search query.
To answer our initial question, yes, parked domains can drag down your click-through rate if you’re running ads in Adwords. However, there is good news. You can view the performance of your parked domain ads by going to the tools section in Adwords, and clicking on ‘site and category exclusion’.
Once you click on a particular campaign, click on ‘page types’. Now you can view exactly how many impressions, clicks, click-through rate, cost, average cost-per-click, conversions, conversion rate and cost per conversion data over a period of time. Now if you see that your parked domains sites are dragging down your click-through rate, you can then select the box next to the name, ‘parked domains’ to exclude it and save your changes. At that point your campaign will no longer show ads on parked domain sites.
The site and category exclusion also allows you to view performance stats on error pages and other categories your ads may appear on. This is a great tool/feature to check periodically in your account to make sure you’re not throwing your money down the drain on parked domains, error pages and other categories.
     | do some of that social network stuff. |
Trying to cut on parked pages could also result in less number of leads.
Now i’m talking in context some of my accounts. There is a pretty good number of leads which come from parked pages.
So i would disagree to the point that the quality score reduces because of a parked page.
Anyways how would it matter if an ad is showing up on a parked page??
I don’t believe it should have any negative effect. Whether it is parked or not shouldn’t really make a difference.
Hi Dany and Nick, I think parked domains are just like any other vertical in adwords, if you can view the performance of that particular vertical then you can determine if it’s worth turning off or leaving on – no matter if it’s dragging down your CTR or not. I could very well be helping your CTR too, it just depends on the account. The good thing is that Google allows you to view the performance and block parked domains if you feel you should. Thanks for reading!
What really matters is not about your ads appearing on parked domains, is whether like what Dany Coutinho mentioned earlier, is about the quality of the leads coming in.
Blocking parked domains ONLY if they are generating high number of clicks and having very low or zero conversions should be the more appropriate approach. At the end of the day is identifying which particular content site displaying your ppc ad is converting at a lower cost per acquisition for lead generating campaigns.