Click fraud identification guidelines released

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has published guidelines for determining when fraudsters are taking advantage of pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements.

PPC ads, which most often appear as text boxes along with search results, are the most popular online ad format yet are vulnerable to click fraud. The subject has long been controversial: advertisers have sometimes complained that the major search engine companies minimize the severity of the problem.

The guidelines establish basic procedures for determining when an ad buyer should or should not pay for a click. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft collaborated with the IAB on the guidelines.

"The recommendations established in these guidelines provide the detailed definition of a 'click' and the standard by which clicks should be measured and counted, including the identification of invalid and/or fraudulent clicks," reads the document, released on Tuesday.

Invalid clicks happen when PPC ads are clicked on with malicious intent or by mistake. For example, a competitor may click on rivals' PPC ads in order to drive up their ad spending. Also, a publisher may click on PPC ads on its site to trigger more commissions. In those two instances, invalid clicks are considered click fraud. However, invalid clicks also come from nonmalicious activity that nonetheless yields a click of little or no value to the advertiser, such as when someone clicks on an ad by mistake or two consecutive times.

Google, whose revenue comes mostly from PPC ads served with its search results or on the sites of partners, has often locked horns with click fraud detection vendors over their estimates of click fraud incidence and their methods for counting invalid clicks.

However, one of the click fraud detection vendors with which Google has often clashed, Click Forensics, participated in the project to come up with the PPC guidelines, a sign that the two companies may now find more common ground.

In January Google questioned Click Forensics' methods and accuracy, in reaction to its fourth-quarter report, which estimated that 17.1 percent of clicks were fraudulent.

"These estimates continue to count clicks Google does not charge to advertisers as fraudulent, so they are not actually click fraud estimates," a Google spokeswoman said via e-mail at the time.

"Furthermore, their estimates have never reflected the invalid click rates we see at Google, which we have previously stated have remained in the range of less than 10 percent of all clicks every quarter since we launched AdWords in 2002," she said.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine