As reported on Search Engine Roundtable, some AdWords users are seeing a new feature in their account allowing them to block their ads from showing up in the Google AdSense for Domains program. If this is true and Google is indeed introducing this feature, I’m sure many advertisers will opt out of having their PPC ads being displayed on domain parking pages, because many online advertisers still mistakenly believe that domain parking is some sort of cybersquatting or unethical practice. Some even associate domain parking with click fraud. So, one can expect that this new feature would result in less revenue for domain owners monetizing their portfolios through domain parking.
Barry Schwartz from SE Roundtable writes:
This seems like an awesome feature and I am eagerly awaiting more information from Google on this.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that if I was him, though. The feature would not only result in less money for domain owners, but in the long run it would also cause a lower ROI for advertisers, in my opinion, because direct navigation traffic is high-quality traffic that converts better than search engine traffic. And Google would make less money, too: address bar driven traffic makes up 15% of all revenue generated by Google and Yahoo.
I just found your post on Digg. I posted some screenshots of the new tool here:
http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/adwords-content-exclusion-beta-a-first-look/
Regarding your point on lower ROI for advertisers, this is only taking into account TYPO domains. This new option allows advertisers to exclude ALL domain and error page traffic.
**ANSWER**
Thanks for posting the link to the screenshots, Dave.
I know that the new feature allows the exclusion of all domain traffic. But still, in the long run, blocking domain ads at all would result in a lower ROI for advertisers, in my opinion. That is because they would block their ads from being displayed on all kinds of type-in domains. I haven’t been referring to typo domains. Many generic domains receive hundreds or thousands of targeted type-ins every day. This traffic is converting very well and therefore it is highly valuable traffic that advertisers are about to disregard in favor of lower-quality search engine traffic. Domain ads have been performing best for many AdWords users!
However, I do agree with you on the fact that there are also lots of low-quality parked domains that do not provide valuable traffic. Therefore, Google should at least allow its users to specify domains they do NOT want to block; I think every camera shop would want its ads to appear on a top-notch domain such as Camera.com or Cameras.com, for instance. (Thinking ahead, this could also result in an increase in value for generic domains. More advertisers = higher cost-per-click = more PPC revenue.)
Many AdWords users, who have never analyzed their traffic and don’t know much about it, will block domain ads. On the other hand, this new feature makes it easier to analyze traffic now, so that it could very well result in better decisions of smart marketers and again more revenue for owners of generic domain names as opposed to owners of bad domains.