Fighting against click fraud
Mar 22, 2007
Yahoo recently announced that more steps have been taken to detect and filter out invalid clicks which are negatively affecting its
advertisers. Reggie Davis has been named the company's new Vice President of marketplace quality and will operate within the
marketing products division of Yahoo's recently-formed Advertiser & Publisher Group, led by Susan Decker.
As Davis said it is going to be an opportunity for him to get into an area where he has shown leadership in the past and will
continue to prove his ability. He will be given the resources to set up his own team with qualified staff focusing on click fraud,
traffic quality, network placement and other marketplace quality issues. His staff will be closely working with advertisers on
quality related matters.
Davis position as VP will be much the same like Google's Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for Trust & Safety at Google.
Ghosemajumder is leading the Click Quality Team at Google and has also been the voice of Google's click fraud prevention efforts
at industry conferences and in the media.
Earlier this month Google has revealed several click frauds in its AdWors system. Google also announced his own initiatives against
invalid clicks like IP filtering for advertisers, more advanced reporting system as well as educational initiatives.
Ghosemajumder pointed out that the amount of invalid clicks on AdWords ads remain constantly under 10 percent and those of
nondetected fraudulent clicks are less than 0.02 percent.
On the other part Yahoo's VP has Davis said that the overall average invalid clicks rate is between 12 and 15 percent for which
they are not billing their advertisers. This way Yahoo can be proud of its aggressiveness against click frauds by protecting his
advertisers and nevertheless shows its commitment of becoming a top leader of this industry as Davis said.
Fighting against click fraud has been always a daily issue and while some are considering Yahoo is dealing more honestly with this
issue the truth is that advertisers can not be sure of the accuracy of figures without the involvement of a third-party auditing
services similarly to other media formats like TV or radio.
One of the top requests of advertisers was to create a system which is filtering out traffic from those countries from where
fraudulent clicks are usually originating. Davis said that it has been done in the new Panama platform which got famous of its
geo-targeting capabilities.
Other important two requests from advertisers were to benefit from discounted prices based on quality and the possibility to block
traffic from individual domains. All these aspects are expected to be implemented and released the following months.
Yahoo's intention as Davis said is to provide visibility, control, and transparency for their advertisers and ensure them of
getting quality traffic.
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