Be a Part of the Action
Jan 3rd, 2008 by msdanielle
The class action, that is. I received an email yesterday that ASK.com is in the midst of a class action lawsuit for alleged click fraud.
If you purchased online advertising from IAC Search & Media, Inc. and/or ASK Jeeves, Inc. (collectively “Askâ€) between August 1, 2005 and the present, you are a class member in a class-action lawsuit, Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles et al. v. Ask Jeeves, Inc. et al,, Case No. CV-2005-52-1, in the Circuit Court of Miller County, Arkansas….
The settlement will provide advertising credits to class members who certify that they were the victims of “click fraud†or other invalid or improper clicks on online advertisements purchased from IAC Search& Media, Inc. and/or Ask Jeeves, Inc. on or after August 1, 2005.
You can read the full settlement notice here. This doesn’t surprise me, as the quality of ASK’s Sponsored Listings has historically been pretty low quality, and very difficult to track, to say the least. But who knows what will happen, and what the scope of the outcome will be.
If you were one of the advertisers using ASK Sponsored Listings in the last two years, fill out the online claim form here. As they state, if you are a member of this class, your legal rights are affected whether you take action or not.
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Let’s face it, click fraud is something which needs to be included in the equation with any PPC network. While it may be possible that, in this case, there has been abuse which can justify a class action, click fraud is present everywhere, not just with these guys.
Alan Johnson
Imagine this is the reason for the next dot com crash? Because not many people click on ads!?
Sure, ad blindness comes as a natural result of people becomming accustomed to the Web. As a webmaster, it’s all trial&error until you find the placement which works best for you.
Alan Johnson
I agree that it’s part of the equation, but I found Ask.com to be overrun with nasty clickfraudsters (is that even a word?). I had several campaigns that got about 10x the daily clicks that the same campaigns (with the same ad text) were getting on Google. The conversion rate was 0%, too, compared to a healthy 5-10% on Google. And yes, there was enough data for that to be statistically significant.
I realize that there is some variation from one search engine to another, but for us, it was ridiculous. The same campaigns that performed extremely well on every other engine generated hundreds of clicks with no sales on Ask. We ended up shutting down all of our campaigns when they wouldn’t work with us to get the problem fixed. We were completely prepared to back up the claims with the appropriate logs, but no one I talked to there would admit that there was a problem. This lawsuit is long overdue.
Indeed, while it is clear that click fraud should be taken into consideration with all PPC networks, action should definitely be taken once things get out of control, with this situation being an example.
Alan Johnson
yea i find that most of my traffic from ask.com doesn’t convert at all. and trying to track the sales from their partners hasn’t been an easy task. however, it’s one of those things where if the client wants you to advertise on this network you have to try to optimize as best you can.