Fight Against Click Fraud Actually Moving Forward

I’ve never had much faith in Google’s ability (or willingness) to actively pursue and snuff out “click fraud”. I put “click fraud” in quotes because I’m using this term with a somewhat unordinary definition. Google, YPN, and others have typically viewed click fraud as when a publisher clicks his or her own ads or if ads are clicked excessively in an attempt to boost revenue. An alternative definition of click fraud, and one that I definitely agree with, is using ad placement to trick or confuse visitors in order to receive more ad clicks. These clicks generate revenue for the site owner but absolutely no value to the advertiser.

I’m not talking about well blended ads, in-line ads, or anything like that. What I’m talking about is people who use, for instance, a text ad string and put it off as navigation. That to me is click fraud.

Recently Google has taken measures to alleviate this form of click fraud. We saw a month or so ago how they put their foot down on the problem of images being placed next to ad blocks. Publishers were placing images next to their ad blocks to not only simply draw attention to the ads but to confuse visitors into thinking that the images were related to the link – thus increasing their CTR but adding no real value to the advertiser’s conversions.

Arrington has a very nice write-up about Google’s new PPA (pay-per-action) advertising system that is currently in testing.

PPA advertising is meant to mitigate the risks of click fraud. Now the advertiser pays only if a customer has been delivered to a website and takes a further action, such as buying a product or filling out a web form.

This is definitely a sign that Google may finally be doing something about the serious problem of click fraud. Will they continue with this method as they slowly realize that worthless clicks account for a large part of their revenue? Who knows? The point is, however, that this is at least a step in the right direction. When advertisers buy space on a site they should at least have some sort of guarantee that their ads not only target the right demographic but are only engaged when the user is interested, not when they were trying to click a link and clicked an ad instead due to shady placement.

I’ve also just read news on CNN Money that Yahoo! is now taking measures to combat click fraud more directly:

Yahoo Inc. has named a senior executive to lead the company’s efforts to combat click fraud in its Web search advertising business, the company said, in a bid to reassure advertisers.

Yahoo, the No. 2 provider of pay-per-click ads behind rival Google Inc., said Wednesday that attorney Reggie Davis, a seven-year veteran of the company, will take on the newly created post of vice president of marketplace quality.

The article also claims that the amount of fraudulent clicks in the Yahoo! Publisher Network is somewhere between 12 and 15 percent. I doubt this number was deduced using the broad definition of click fraud, but perhaps that will also be something addressed by the new “marketplace quality” executive.

I also believe this position is a good sign that YPN! will be coming out of beta before too long. With more and more questions being raised about Google’s marketplace quality, hopefully YPN! will make that one of their biggest concerns (and ultimate selling points over Google) when they take their service public. At the end of the day, however, these are both good steps for contextual advertising. Click fraud is a serious issue that few really seem to actually be taking seriously.