Click fraud - Click Quality Council publishes its recommendations
A group of companies (including Agency.com) that calls itself the Click Quality Council has been giving the subject of click fraud some serious thought, and has issued some guidelines, which I first read about here.
The recommendations look very sensible. The main principles are:
- Advertisers should not be expected to pay for double clicks or repeat clicks from the same session.
- Advertisers should never pay for traffic from bots.
- Advertisers should have control over where, when and to whom ads are distributed.
- Domain and IP exclusion lists from search providers should be easy to use and maintain.
- Search providers should give advertisers detailed referrer information on all traffic that is billed.
- Advertisers should never pay for traffic originating outside the specific geo-targeted settings.
- Search engines should adopt third-party validation for click quality as other media companies have done for their audience validation.
- Search providers should offer an easy mechanism to reconcile paid clicks on a monthly basis.
There are a number of problems with implementing them practically today, but there are things a smart advertiser (and his/her agency) can do to address these problems.
The main problem is that some of the information just isn’t readily available from PPC search providers. Google’s network of content sites is opaque: you don’t get to see the publisher sites that generated your traffic. This is reminiscent of the days when affiliate networks wouldn’t tell you who the top publishers were, claiming ownership of the networks, when in fact they are more like a financial and tracking intermediary.
That being the case, black-listing specific content sites isn’t really that feasible, at least for the biggest current PPC network. Smart marketers monitor PPC advertising through to conversion and would ideally eliminate poorly converting PPC traffic, but you can’t do that if your report doesn’t break out traffic by publisher site.
Marketers should ensure they have their own tracking in place, and that the tracking uses as much referrer information as is supplied, so they can report clicks and conversions for themselves in as much detail as possible, and analyse their own unique visitors by traffic source. Reliance on Google Analytics for this kind of reporting is really only for the entry-level online business, as Google’s obfuscation of the data continues into its analytics product.
The guidelines are very positive and should form the basis for demands from advertisers and agencies. Greater transparency and control can be achieved. If competitors are able to offer products that Google presently will not, this will help promote improvement.
