More Light, Less Heat on Click Fraud at SES

Like Google, Yahoo! released the first stats on its invalid click problem in the weeks before SES, saying that it tagged and discarded between 12% and 15% of its overall click traffic. Again, not all those clicks represented true fraud, Davis said. Some of them were bogus while others were just “less consistently converting traffic for some of our advertisers”. And as in Google’s case, some of those catches were false positives that were not charged to marketers but may have converted nonetheless.

Davis said Yahoo!’s Marketplace Integrity Team has been reviewing publishers in the Yahoo! content network weekly and taking action against those who are not complying with the company’s site guidelines. The company has also been dong deep analysis around specific verticals and keywords that seem to be more vulnerable than others to fraud and pressing advertisers to use its conversion tools.

“Help us help you,” he said. “Provide us with more information around conversion data. If you do, we’ll be in a much stronger position to analyze your traffic and provide you with better quality traffic.” Sharing that conversion data has been a sticking point in the click fraud fight; many advertisers are reluctant to give the search engines that much visibility into how well search marketing performs for them.

And quality scoring of pay-per-click ads under Yahoo!’s new Panama platform—delivering and ranking ads based in part on their clickability, not solely on marketers’ bids—has led to a “significant reduction in the number of claims coming in from advertisers seeking refunds,” Davis said.

In the coming month, Yahoo! will launch an online Marketplace Quality Center to keep advertisers informed about the company’s click-fraud and traffic-quality initiatives and to accept their input. Davis said the plan is to roll out a password-protected site that will let advertisers submit requests for click inquiries over the Web.

“We’re ready to work with you,” he told the audience. “We want to make sure that you’re getting the quality of traffic you want. Nobody here is going to be 100% right. My job, and my team’s job is to do the best we possibly can, so that it’s an easy decision for you to continue to advertise with us, continue to spend money with Yahoo! and continue to get quality traffic.”

Other Yahoo! initiatives for 2007 include quality-based pricing, with discounts for poorly converting traffic; domain blocking; an ad council forum for gathering advertiser feedback; and more detailed refund reporting, so marketers can have a better understanding of what traffic is being credited and why.

Click Forensics’ Cuthbert said anecdotal reports from the 3500 companies participating in its Click Fraud Network suggested that indeed, “things are improving.”

“We’re bullish on things that are going on in the [click fraud detection] space,” he said. “We think this is actual progress.” Specifically, he commended Google for introducing IP exclusion and enhanced invalid click reporting, and praised Yahoo!’s appointment of a VP-level executive to take charge of traffic quality and for the prospect of domain-level blocking.

But none of these advances eliminate the need for third-party auditors who can certify that search engines are providing the quality of traffic that advertisers expect, he said. “Advertisers are not satisfied having the publishers monitoring what’s going on in their campaigns,” he said. “Television, radio and print all have their own third-party entities.” Both Yahoo! and Google have committed to working with outside click auditors, he added, and progress is being made in that direction.

“The industry needs third parties, and I believe that both Yahoo! and Google understand that,” Cuthbert said.

But Ghosemajumder suggested that unlike TV or print marketers, online advertisers already have access to a number of tools that can tie advertising directly to sales but that require some expertise to use properly. Advertisers may wish to outsource those functions—which is where third parties can play a part, he said.

Click Tracks’s Marshall relayed a case study to illustrate how difficult an art it can be to distinguish a case of click fraud from simply a poor-performing ad. One of his company’s pay-per-click ads suddenly started seeing a large increase in traffic without a corresponding sales increase. But on first analysis the traffic looked okay, coming from different IP addresses, 89% of them within the U.S., and with the browsers performing in un-clickbot-like fashion, executing JavaScript, loading images and accepting cookies.

But 90% to 95% of the visits looked only at a single page on the Click Tracks site, and the referring domain “looked suspicious.” Click Tracks concluded that something bad was going on, submitted the claim and received a credit for fraud, Marshall says.

The moral: Even for a company “above average” in Web analysis, it was hard to tell when click activity was invalid. Marshall urged the audience to toss out the notion that any automated tool could examine the data and draw correct conclusions about a click’s legitimacy.

Instead, human analysts at Click Tracks used metrics based on intimate knowledge of their Web site to spot anomalies in such metrics as the average time spent on site. If a campaign differs on a number of data points from other campaigns run by the same marketer, fraud may be a possibility.

But Marshall cautioned against relying of ROI—or rather a lack of it-- as a fraud indicator, since advertisers running ads against a large list of keywords will often have many campaigns that produce no meaningful ROI

“I’m of the opinion that examining what’s going on in different campaigns requires human judgment,” he said. “Sort your campaigns on different criteria, and then look at those that are different in some definable way.”

And if such examinations pick up poor-performing ads rather than instances of fraud, Marshall had this comment: “So what?”

A poor performer among search ads needs fixing just as urgently as a case of click fraud needs investigation, he said. “Either way, the ad should be fixed.”