Google Sued for Ad Fraud; Another Class Action Settlement?
Today Google was slapped with a an advertising fraud lawsuit that will be fascinating – and important – for AdWords advertisers to watch. The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, was filed by the firm of Kabateck Brown Kellner, on behalf of David Almeida, a Massachusetts-based private investigator. The lawsuit claims that Google defrauds advertisers by obscuring the fact that new AdWords campaigns are set by default to display ads on both Google’s search results pages (and like pages served by partners like AOL) and pages owned by site publishers who display AdWords ads via Google’s Adsense programs. Readers of my weekly SEW Content Advertising column are familiar with this phenomenon, and my suggested best practice of creating separate search and content campaigns. At the risk of making life harder for my friends at Google, I need to point out that the suit seems to get one important fact wrong. Reports today in CNET, Yahoo! Finance, Wired and other outlets imply that advertisers
