Thursday, Jul 17, 2008    Text size: 

Plaintiff Hal K. Levitte, a Boston attorney, claims that Google never made clear to him that his ads would appear on error sites and parked domains and is guilty of fraudulent advertising under California’s Business and Professions Codes 17200 and 17500 relative to unjust enrichment.

Levitte mounted an $887.67 campaign to promote his law practice's website, hoping that click throughs would generate phone calls and emails.

But he was surprised at the number of clicks that came from parked domains and errors.

Levitte claims that from June 2007 to August 2007 that he received 202,528 impressions (or times his ad appeared in a web browser in response to a search) from parked domains, 668 clicks and zero conversions. Over the same period, he received 1,009 impressions from error pages, 25 clicks and zero conversions.

Domain and error page ads accounted for 16.2 percent of all clicks on Levitte’s ad during his campaign yet did not result in single person contacting him, the suit said.

In the suit, Levitte claims that Google never made clear to him that his ads would appear on error sites and parked domains. When he initially contacted Google over the matter, the search engine claimed that clicks that had come from those parked and error sites were legitimate, even if they resulted in no conversions.

Later, the search engine provided a way to opt into third-party sites while excluding error sites and parked domains, according to the suit. Levitte contends, however, that this option was buried "four clicks deep within [Google's] interface, where many advertisers would not notice it."

The suit seeks class-action status for everyone in the U.S. with an AdWords account over the last four years.