Written By Reprise Media | August 8, 2006 | Share This |

Here we are: Another August, another flight to the West Coast, and another series of almost-live posts from the annual Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.
After arriving in San Jose late last night and attending Ask.com’s opening soiree at Club Fahrenheit, this morning was my first chance to actually head out to a session. […]

Here we are: Another August, another flight to the West Coast, and another series of almost-live posts from the annual Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.

After arriving in San Jose late last night and attending Ask.com’s opening soiree at Club Fahrenheit, this morning was my first chance to actually head out to a session. First session of the day? Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud.

Here’s a quick recap of a couple of the main issues touched on by the panel:

Case(s) Closed: The panel started out with some discussion of recent developments in click fraud litigation. Google and Yahoo! have both recently settled massive class action lawsuits regarding click fraud on their networks, albeit each in their own style. Google’s settlement on the Lane’s Gifts case is already in motion - advertisers who opted in and made a claim by August 4th will get a refund out of a pool of $30 million dollars based on the size of their spend during the claim period. (With any remaining funds donated to charity - way to “Be Good,” Google). On the other hand, as we reported here a few weeks ago, Yahoo’s waiting for approval on their case with Checkmate. Individual claimants under the suit will be entitled to a full refund of up to 100% of fraudulent clicks as long as they can — wait for it — prove the fraudulent nature of the clicks. Any award can either be taken as a cash refund or can be credited back into an advertiser’s YSM account.

This isn’t the end of litigation for the two giants - a new lawsuit has recently surfaced from Ben Edelman, who is alleging that Yahoo is including spyware vendors in their publisher network, companies that are artificially inflating clicks by creating vast networks of poorly targeted doorway pages.
What have you done for me lately?: Next, the conversation turned to a discussion about what the engines are doing to improve their click fraud detection. As part of their recent settlement with Checkmate, Yahoo! has agreed to allow groups of their advertisers to view their backend click fraud monitoring solutions and make suggestions for improvements. John Slade from YSM also claimed that the company was going to appoint an official click fraud spokesperson to address concerns in the press and among advertisers.

The other engines were a bit less progressive. Shuman Ghosemajumder of Google pointed to the a 17 page study outlining common mistakes made by third-party tracking systems in recognizing fraudulent clicks. (Lots of reading material coming out of Mountain View these days) Two main takeaways here: 1) Tracking systems don’t do a good job of distinguishing between an initial click and subsequent reloads or returns to a landing page during the same session. If an advertiser sees 5 clicks from the same IP address in a short period of time, they’re going to consider all of that traffic fraudulent, and will ignore the first valid click. 2) Many third party tracking systems also confuse clicks from Yahoo! and Google, attributing clicks to the wrong source, and causing advertisers to request refunds for clicks from the wrong party.
Standards and Methodologies Possibly the biggest topic of discussion was the IAB’s recent announcement that they’re forming a cross-industry task force to define and standardize click fraud measurement. They’ve brought the Media Ratings Council into the fold (the folks who’ve been auditing Arbitron and Nielsen’s numbers for years), lending a bit of credence to the efforts. The engines all seemed to be drinking the Kool Aid.

Of course, they don’t have much choice in the matter anymore, do they? As Jessie Stricchiola from Alchemist Media reminded the crowd, the engines weren’t focusing on click fraud as an issue until litigation forced them to do so. One of the lesser mentioned pieces of Dr. Tuzhilin’s paper examines how Google dealt with “double-clicking” on ads - essentially, less savvy users who are used to double clicking on everything on their desktop, and who expect the same UI online. The report explains that until March 2005 Google was counting and charging for both clicks. Of course, they’ve since filtered out those clicks as a matter of policy, but only because advertisers sat up, took notice and pushed the issue. (Bravo.)