Photo credit: early_days Odds are you've run across a parked domain yourself while surfing the web. A parked domain is a page that has nothing but ads on it and serves no other purpose than to get ad clicks. When webmasters purchase a domain but don't have time to focus on developing it right away, they will use one of the many domain parking services out there to put up a page of ads on the site with the hopes of generating a little revenue while it sits there. Parked domains are frequently used as annoying pop-ups or pop-unders. Sometimes people will even run AdWords campaigns that go straight to parked domains, hoping to make more money from the ads on the site being clicked than Google charges them for their campaign. In the pay-per-click business, this is called arbitrage. A lot of these parked domains run Google AdSense, which means that the ads displayed on their site are paid for by people like yourself who are running campaigns on the content network. You don't want this to be you -- these clicks convert horribly and will almost surely cost you money. Thankfully, Google knows a lot of advertisers hate parked domains and out of the goodness of their hearts they have made it easy to block your ads from showing up on them. Here's how: 1. Sign in to AdWords. Click on Tools -> More Tools. 2. Click Site and Category Exclusion. 3. Select your content network campaign from the drop-down box 4. Click the Page Types tab. 5. Check the Parked domains box to exclude these pages from showing your ads. From this screen you can block your ads from showing on other categories of pages as well, such as error pages and image-sharing pages. Depending on your business, I would generally recommend blocking error pages and parked domains at the minimum. [caption id="attachment_159" align="aligncenter" width="236" caption="Page Categories You Can Exclude On The Adwords Content Network"][/caption] Google's content network is a great way to turn on traffic to your website. You'll get a lot more eyeballs (impressions) on your ads versus advertising on the AdWords search network, simply because of there are so many publishers on the web who are monetizing their sites with Google AdSense. But it's a jungle out there, and unless you are only buying space on a few specific sites (the content network lets you choose the sites by hand if you'd like), you need to keep an eye on where your ads are showing up. Blocking your ads from showing on low-quality traffic sites like parked domains will help increase your CTR and stop you from wasting money on the content network.