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Jordan Glogau has been involved with marketing and sales on the Internet since 1995. He has worked for a number of computer and Internet company like DEC, Sharp and IDT and presently at Haiku-Marketing.com. Jordan is involved in Search Engine and Internet Marketing for ecommerce, healthcare, real estate, financing, consumer products and reputation management . He can be contacted at jglogau atphr400.com .

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Click Fraud Dialog Finally Begins: How Google’s Actions Can Kickstart Healthier Conversation

Written on
Aug 23, 2006 
Author
Jordan Glogau  |
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Click Fraud Dialog Finally Begins: How Google’s Actions Can Kickstart Healthier Conversation

Google’s Click Fraud Stats

The addition to the AdWords interface is really minor, but it could be helpful if you were comparing your own internal logs to Google’s. In the Reports tab in AdWords, you can customize the columns that are displayed. Standard columns include impressions, clicks, and CTR. There are two new columns, one is Invalid Clicks, and the other is Invalid Clicks Rate. Google is now willing to tell you the results of their own filtering—at least at the campaign level. To quote the Google blog:

“These clicks are filtered in real-time by our systems before advertisers are charged for them. The resulting data will of course differ from one advertiser to the next. In addition, a much smaller number of invalid clicks may also be credited to advertisers’ accounts after-the-fact, as the result of a publisher being terminated from the AdSense program for invalid click activity. These will appear as account-level credits.”

Third-Party Click Fraud Audit Reports

Google really came out swinging in this report on the third-party click fraud auditing firms. Here are their two main complaints written pretty much verbatim from the actual report:

“Fictitious clicks due to detection of page reloads as ad clicks. This is the counting of page reloads on an advertiser’s site as multiple clicks on the advertiser’s AdWords ad which did not actually occur.

Fictitious clicks due to conflation across advertisers and ad networks. This is the counting of one advertiser’s traffic in another advertiser’s report, even if the advertisers span different ad networks.”

These two problems are serious, and have resulted in significant inflation of click fraud estimates from each of the click fraud auditing firms we examined.”

The appendixes then show examples of counting anywhere from 2 to 6 times for the same click.

However, we haven’t seen a response from the audit firms and in the Click Fraud session at SES, there wasn’t enough time to review the study for them to comment on the criticism. But if this proves to be the case, these audit firms need to fix said issues.

Click Measurement Working Group

The IAB announcement regarding the forming of the industry-wide Click Measurement Working Group to create a set of Click Measurement Guidelines was another positive step. This will be a joint effort with the Media Rating Council (MRC) to define a “click” and the standard against which clicks are measured and counted and determining what are invalid clicks and/or fraudulent clicks.

So far, the following search engines are members of the Working Group: Ask.com, Google, LookSmart, MSN, and Yahoo.

The Click Measurement Guidelines will recommend industry-driven auditing and certification recommendation for any organization involved in performance-based marketing like search engines, ad networks, third-party ad servers or any company that counts clicks as a part of the media currency.

If you’re wondering about advertiser feedback, according to Erica DeLorenzo, Senior Manager, Industry Initiatives & Legal Affairs at IAB, “IAB committees are only open to IAB members, however, there will be opportunities for other interested industry constituents to be involved and/or comment. For example, if you are an advertiser, we’d refer you to work with the ANA which will then in turn aggregate their members’ opinions and responses in regards to these guidelines. At the appropriate time, we will also seek public comment.”

Let’s hope they stay the course and ask for this feedback.

Summary — Let the Discussions Begin

If you’ve read my previous articles, you know that I have been critical of the search engine’s response to the click fraud issue. Up until now, we’ve had a combination of FUD, or no response whatsoever. But these latest developments prompt the start of a long-term discussion, much to the benefit of both advertisers and the search engines.





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