Black Friday Deals. 20 minutes ago, I was checking the status of several online paid search campaigns, designing a banner in Photoshop, listening to music and sipping on my hot cup of peppermint tea. One of the campaigns I’m monitoring right now is a campaign tied to the American Black Friday sale weekend. Naturally, I wanted to check out who else was advertising “Black Friday Canada” keywords and getting in on the Black Friday action. One of the keywords we bid for in our campaign was, “black friday sale” and this is what I found (Our campaign isn’t set to run anywhere near the wee hours of the morning, but my sleeping schedule is outta wack lately):

1. As expected, there has been an increase of Adwords advertisers. Earlier this week and even just yesterday, I only noticed Sears and RedFlagDeals.com ads (in Canada)
2. Interestingly an Ad from Ask.com:
   

   Black Friday SALE
   FIND Discounts & Coupons
   Top Results With Ask
   Black-Friday-Sale.Ask.com

Here’s the Ask.com ad:

Curious, I clicked it to see what kind of promotions I might have seen, but I also wanted to know why Ask.com (indeed a search engine), was advertising on Google; here is what I found:

Firstly, the similarities between Google SERP vs. Ask.com SERP

1. The top 2 advertisers, as in Google, Sears and RedFlagDeals.com
2. Similar search engine results; BFads.net ranks first in their SERP too

The point of this post is to simply ask your opinions about these Black-Friday-Sale.ask.com; Are these ads worthwhile?