Overcharged Search Content: Paying Too Much for Too Little

San Diego, CAWhen you purchase advertising you expect the ads that you buy will produce a return on your investment in the form of paying customers. You also expect that the money you spend will help your business and not your competitor or other unrelated companies. However, some Internet advertisers are discovering that they may have been overcharged for their mobile content advertisements because they are not getting nearly the response rate they expected.

And now come the lawsuits. Google faces several lawsuits regarding its sales of ad space and use of keywords. One such lawsuit was filed by an attorney who advertised his services through a Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign. According to the lawsuit, the ad received 202,528 impressions in two-and-a-half months from parked domain pages. Such pages usually have no content but provide ads related to the searched keyword. For example, a search with the keyword "ringtones" might bring back a page of sponsored links, all of which are businesses hoping you will click on their link.

The attorney alleges that out of the over 200,000 impressions, only 668 clicks (visitors who clicked on the link to visit his website) occurred and none of those turned into conversions (people contacting the attorney directly). The plaintiff also claims that advertisers have no means to opt out of the AdSense for Domains and/or AdSense for Errors programs. The lawsuit seeks class action status and hopes to represent other parties who advertised with Google and received unsatisfactory results.

According to Google, the AdSense for domains is, "scalable and easily implemented so that your network of sites can start earning revenue quickly and easily. We offer a robust automated targeting solution powered by our AdRank algorithm that intelligently selects the most relevant ads and categories for your domains." Despite that, the plaintiff says that he did not earn any revenue from the program.

Another lawsuit, also regarding parked websites was filed in US District Court of California, San Jose. The suit alleges that Google defrauded customers by charging them for clicks from parked websites. The plaintiff claims that the parked websites only create ad revenue for Google and the owner of the site while the ad customer derives no benefit. Furthermore, advertisers are not given the addresses of the parked sites, so they cannot go and evaluate whether or not they were charged fairly for clicks from the site.

The lawsuit alleges Google is guilty of fraudulent concealment, unjust enrichment and violation of California's business code.

Meanwhile, some Google and other search engine customers may file a lawsuit of their own, alleging they were overcharged for mobile word advertising. They allege that they overpaid for keyword advertisements for services including ringtones, movies, graphics and games and are not only not receiving the response rate they expected but may actually be helping competitors out because of the overlap of certain keywords.

If you paid for mobile content advertising and believe you have been overcharged contact a lawyer to discuss your legal options. You may be able to recover some or all of the money you spent on what you believed was worthwhile advertising.