Staying ahead of click fraud

Posted January 4th, 2007 at 2:41 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 6 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News, Yahoo! Opinions

Click fraud has been in the spotlight quite a bit in the last six months. Click fraud is generally considered to be “clicks made with bad faith with the sole purpose of generating a charge to the advertiser with zero possibility of a legitimate site visit or transaction occurring.” Earlier this week, search influencer Jeffrey K. Rohrs put out an open letter dubbed the “Sausage Manifesto” to paid search networks like Yahoo!, Google, MSN, Ask.com and others, asking about the problem and what companies like ours are doing to address it.

Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Senior Director of Product Management John Slade posted a preliminary comment in response and we didn’t want you to miss it:

Hi Jeff,

John Slade from Yahoo! here. On behalf of the entire team, just wanted to jump in and say that I really appreciate your opening up this forum because (yes, it’s true!) we at Yahoo! want more dialogue too. We’re more than happy to participate in this discussion because we firmly believe that open communication – along with real commitment – is the best way this industry can get ahead of the click fraud issue.

I’m going to post in more detail on this blog in the coming days, but wanted to start off by reassuring you and your readers that Yahoo! agrees that click fraud is a serious challenge. We as marketing professionals shouldn’t spend any more time arguing about whether click fraud is a problem or what percentage it is. Any amount of money – no matter how small – lost as a result of click fraud is worthy of our attention. So we believe the more important discussion is, How can we better identify it and fight it?

I know I’ve said this many times on conference panels and in interviews, but I can’t state enough that tolerating click fraud is NOT the path to long term success as a search engine. We know that the ongoing growth of this industry hinges entirely on the ROI we deliver to our advertisers — if we don’t filter out click fraud, our customers will lower their bids or reduce their spend with us. I think I speak on behalf of my colleagues at Google, MSN, Ask.com and others when I say that click fraud does nothing but erode the trust that businesses have in our medium, and we want to put a stop to it.

Click fraud isn’t going to be solved by any one company and it sure as heck isn’t going to be addressed with a single solution. Tracking, filtering, standards or lawsuits alone aren’t the answer. There are multiple facets to this problem and we need to fight it together – search engines, advertisers, agencies, tool providers, researchers – on multiple fronts.

With that belief in mind, Yahoo! is working hard to put our money where our mouth is. We proactively identify suspicious clicks and remove them from our billing system 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — as a result, we’ve given away billions of clicks for free. We’ve invested significant technological, financial and human resources in clickthrough protection since we started this industry in 1998 and are redoubling our efforts by dedicating even more resources to this issue. You’ll be hearing more specifics from us soon, but I can tell you that we have in fact committed to building a Traffic Quality Resource Center, are continually expanding our clickthrough protection team and will be announcing new leaders within our organization who will focus entirely on enhancing and overseeing our traffic quality initiatives.

I know there’s a lot more discussion to be had and many more questions to answer, so you’ll be hearing more from me and others at Yahoo! as this forum evolves. I look forward to reading additional perspectives from our fellow industry colleagues (thanks for taking the first plunge, Andrew!), and will make sure to keep everyone apprised of our developments on this front.

John Slade
Sr. Director, Product Management
Yahoo! Search Marketing

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6 Comments Add your own

hector | January 5th, 2007 at 8:32 pm

Yahoo! i admire your traffic quality initiatives. John your response post was very informative. When it comes to making quick, easy money, some will do anything! Even when they know, it will affect them negatively in their lifetime. On a positive note, they say online holiday spending has been good :-)

Reading ‘The Sausage Manifesto’ and then checking ‘Netrospective’ made me sad but it also got me thinking about the real world.
Real world means competition, struggle, evolution and survival.
I would love to see
- a stronger Yahoo! brand.
- periodic buzz about Yahoo! with ads, products, creative initiatives.
- Most work with what we have studied during our education years, their has to be periodic study of new languages, analysis of other companies, communication and interaction with current generation.
- It’s ancient knowledge, create new leaders coz they know the generation and users but let them be guided and advised by old leaders coz they know the company.
Finally remember even the Lions hunt in pack coz togather they can hunt more and watch out for hyena’s.

hector | January 5th, 2007 at 9:47 pm

I feel like a coward, i know its so easy to comment but actions and decisions are tough.
Anyway, i read content delivered by these keywords at these engines:
Msn search- msn panama yahoo
Google search- yahoo panama google
aol search- yahoo panama aol

While i was reading all those blogs and sites i was also listening at http://www.thepartnermaker.com/weekly_insight/index.php?id=6

I read about podcast at wiki and i am thinking how come websites dont have voice commentry when people are at their page?

I would never want to be a spectator while playing FPS but with you all being a spectator is starting to be fun ;-)

Paul M | January 24th, 2007 at 8:23 pm

This article is the first time I’ve become aware of the Click Fraud issue. While I agree that this issue should be addressed by all concerned, I also recognize that some of my surfing actions could be interpreted that way though that was not my intent. On many occasions I search for a business that I have a relationship with to check my accounts or place an order. If they have an entry in the Sponsored list I will often click that rather than the nearly identical one that shows up in the regular list a few items down. The problem is that the Sponsored links often seem to lead to areas of the site that don’t appear to have a way to get to the area that I’m interested in. When that happens, I go back to the results and select the non Sponsored link that takes me to the main Home Page for the company where I can find the resources that I do want. I don’t know how common this is among the user base but I wanted to let both sides know that this does happen, at least in my case. If there is a way to assess the search results better that I am not aware of that will prevent this approach from appearing desirable I would like to know what it is. I’ll try to remember to check back periodically to see what solutions are being considered to this issue. Thank you for your attention and I now yield the floor.

Ben | February 21st, 2007 at 11:57 am

That being said, I hate all pop-up and pop-under advertising full stop. Specifically I cannot abide any website that opens a window without my specific permission or knowledge.

There are several online advertising companies that use various underhanded tricks to bypass the browser’s pop-up blocking software.

The worst offender for this is tribalfusion.com. They have stopped me from continuing to support some big websites such as experts-exchange.com, MacSlash.org and Dilbert Online. The common ads you see from this company are Smiley Central and Tickle.com.

I detest this technique and wish someone “big” would sue them. Technically I see this activity as a deliberate circumvention of my computer’s security (illegal in many countries) and hence, I make a point of clicking on every ad that I get shown using such dirty, sly practices.

Therefore, the term “click fraud” in this context should more appropriately be called “click wrath”!

I encourage more users to click on any adverts that mysteriously appear in pop-ups and pop-unders to discourage the continued practice of using them. They won’t listen to us any other way. Vote with your clicks people. :-)

Ymiller | September 22nd, 2008 at 5:01 pm

To Ben:

Although you may think you’re making a statement by clicking on a popup to waste their money, you’re actually doing just the opposite.

Popup and pop under ads are generally paid for by impression, not by resulting clicks. The fact that you are clicking on them only proves to the advertiser that the advertisement is being effective in getting a response, and encouraging them to continue.

Ymiller | September 22nd, 2008 at 5:04 pm

To Ben:

(continued)

It’s the same as if you were complaining about junk mail, and for each store advertisement you recieved you would drive down to the store and stand around to waste their electricity.

Technically, if you want to get back at them, turn your pop up blocker off and just ignore every pop up. That’s what they’re paying for.