Parked.com Also Part Of Google-Ask Provider Problem

Posted on | March 2, 2008 | No Comments

Jeez, you guys bored of reading this stuff yet? Sorry, but I just need to point all this stuff out!

If you’re currently using Parked.com, you might have noticed a decrease in revenue. Been out of town for 3 days but just read a post on Namepros regarding the situation with Parked. I really had no clue they were affected, but… it seems as if they have. Here’s the quote from Donny of Parked.com:

I was not allowed to make an announcement to our customers about the Ask issue, but it wasn’t hard to figure out since everybody was posting that Ask was losing their Google feed. An announcement was supposed to go out yesterday, but I guess it wasn’t sent out and now I can’t find the official version right now so I’ll have to find it later and post it inside the dashboard and on here.

Basically we had two feeds, Yahoo which accepts traffic from 50 countries. And Ask, which was some of Ask’s own PPC system and it was backfilled by Google. They were our secondary feed/traffic Yahoo didn’t want. In January, Ask renewed their contract with Google which was even mentioned here, but later I found out that the new contract no longer allowed sub-syndication (parking) of the feed. We were told Ask had a plan and we had nothing to worry about, but nothing happened. We were working with a few Google providers directly, but that all fell through as well since Google kept putting up more roadblock for all parking companies. This affects everybody who had an Ask feed.

In our case we have implemented a solution that currently includes 12 different PPC providers with the hope of having that number to around 20 in the next week. We will also include some CPA companies as well for what is called “run of network” traffic or no results traffic. It’s not a perfect solution, but overtime it will continue to improve.

As always if you do not want to send traffic to our secondary provider(s), you can set the Alternative Traffic Destination in the Account Information section, it is patented technology we created almost two years ago when at the time we had no international solution at all. Make sure you use the Primary Only option and that will redirect any domain that is not going to Yahoo. So if you have a hit from the US, it would go to our primary and if you get a hit from Indonesia, it would be redirected to your choice of locations.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Donny

Well, that’s that. Since I haven’t been on my home computer, I haven’t logged in to see whats up. Granted I don’t even have 1% of my domains at Parked, I can still get a good idea of whats going on with some of my specific domains which do have trends and average PPC. I’m definitely going to be moving some domains around, and Parked was my backup for domains that were going to start performing poorly at other providers but I’m not sure what’s going on now. It’s just a huge mess if you ask me.

All part of domaining, no doubt about it, but we must learn to improvise in certain situations. Like I said, I haven’t been home to see what’s up with my domains that are parked at these providers that have had their advertisers lose their Google feed, but I do know I’m not going to be liking the stats when I see them. It’s time to start moving domains around again and see where “they work the best.” Hassle if you have a large portfolio… especially having to go through template editing and keyword optimization.

On a great note, Parking Panel has actually went back to semi-normal. I say semi-normal lightly since it’s been two days at what I consider normal, but I am going to be e-mailing my Parking Panel account manager to look into my account and hopefully recommend something. THAT made my day seeing stats back up. Parking Panel is probably going to be my new backup… but just a little quirks that need to be ironed out till I give ‘em a 4.5/5.

If you have any questions, just use my contact form!

P.S: This post might be updated a little later today since I am writing it at 4:25AM. Everything I wanted to say is in it but there might be typos!

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