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Search Companies Team Up Against Click Fraud
isabotage3 writes to tell us that the top three search companies, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, have teamed up to create an alliance to combat click fraud. The fact that these three bitter rivals can team up shows just how serious the industry has become about preserving the current online advertising boom that is currently underway. From the article: "Click fraud has attracted an increasing amount of attention amid class-action lawsuits and industry studies asserting advertisers have been collectively overcharged by more than $1 billion for bogus sales leads during the past four years. Google and Yahoo contend that those estimates are gross exaggerations generated by opportunistic lawyers and online advertising consultants hoping to cash in on the anxieties triggered by their calculations."
....gross exaggerations generated by opportunistic lawyers and online advertising consultants hoping to cash in on the anxieties triggered by their calculations"
I can't put my finger on it, but that sentence seems to have a lot of redundancy built into it.
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General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
If you read the article, one of the things they say is how hard it is to determine the "intent" of the person clicking the ad. Are they serious shoppers, casual browsers, or even one of those teenagers who sign up for those click-for-profit type schemes. Well duh! Of course you can never know this. To me it's all quite silly. The point of online advertising is the same as the point of any other advertising medium - drive up sales (or, notoriety). And that information is readily available to the client companies. They know what their ad budget is and they know what their sales are (and polls tell them what their notioriety is). In the end they should have enough data to make their own determinations as to how valuable online ads are to them, and then they should pay accordingly. I know this is all easier said than done when the prefered pricing model seems to be click-based. But, at some point the numbers should tell the story, and if it means the online ads aren't worth what they are costing, then spend they should reallocate their ad dollars elsewhere. Eventually the pricing will align with value.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
advertisers have been collectively overcharged by more than $1 billion for bogus sales leads during the past four years.
Then maybe those advertisers should think before they agree to be advertised on those get a free ipod sites. I mean seriously who doesn't cancel those agreements as soon as you sign up for them. I wouldn't pay these people a nickle if I was an advertiser, yet they make enough to cover the cost of free ipods or free laptops even.
The primary concern about "click-fraud" is that you're being charged for clicks that were meant to intentionally drive your costs up. In essence this means wasting money, since you can't really track who meant to click and who didn't. This adds up to tens of thousands of dollars very quickly.
The irony is that many of the companies that are uncomfortable with this medium for advertising is that they're perfectly willing to spend millions on TV and print advertising where they can't even reliably track anything. And worse, they have to hope the people that actually give a damn about their product or service are even in the market. I don't know about you, but I get my drink, go to the bathroom, and pop popcorn during commercials. With online advertising -- especially on search engines -- people only see your commercials [ads] because they were looking for something related. (I could go on a tangent here about how a clothing company will bid on keywords related to automobiles... maybe later.)
Having worked in the online advertising/marketing industry (tech sector) for over 2 years now, this problem is not easily solved. The fraudsters know all about proxies, onion routing, and a host of other tricks to drive up the costs of competitors. Then, there are those that simply think it's clever to generate traffic (on IRC we called them spammers, floodbots, etc.).
We provide our clients with click-fraud reporting using our algorithms. They're pretty accurate. But, this accuracy is based on a model, which is based on 50% hard data, and 50% conjecture. What's missing with our reporting is that Google, Yahoo!, and MSN don't give it any weight, and frankly dismiss it.
I'm hopeful that this "coming together" will help client confidence so they can move away from [nearly] untrackable advertising on TV, print, and radio. It all starts with "the big 3" -- if they're willing to assist, it's much better than a 3rd party trying to decipher 3rd party results and then have to prove it to "the big 3."
My ZooLoo
You mean the people who are constantly looking for ways to ruin my browsing experience with a never-ending parade of Flash ads, pop-up windows and gigantic CSS floating DIVs might be getting overcharged? Excuse me for not feeling sorry for them. Now where's that World's Smallest Violin?