Friday, August 18, 2006
PPC Click Fraud Has No Single Answer
The lengthy piece in BusinessWeek about the recent click fraud conference is a good summary of where things stand, but it's missing a few things.The model offered by ContextWeb of separating the compensation mechanism between publishers and advertisers could eliminate much of the click fraud on small publishers sites. ContextWeb's model pays publishers on a CPM basis, so there job is only to worry about bringing the traffic and they would have no motivation to click on their own ads. Advertisers can pay by the click or other methods, and the ad network figures out how to balance the two to make a profit.
There could still be competitive click fraud in this scenario, but that's a much smaller problem. Of course publishers would have a hard time arguing for better rates based on their click throughs if they didn't have the data, but they could always shop for multiple advertisers if they aren't fairly compensated.
The article omits the part that better analytics (IP tracking, open reporting on Google's behalf of repetitive clicks, etc.) can have in addressing click fraud. While there is a recommendation for third-party auditing (which would have Google et al throwing up the trade secret defense), I'd take it even further.
The companies who have won click fraud lawsuits and the search engines they sued should jointly fund an independent R&D effort for improving click fraud detection. Forget the settlements; instead put the money towards research that would have to be approved by both search engines and advertisers. The research company signs NDAs with the search engines, so no secrets are let out.
The move to pay-per-action will continue until these other solutions are fully implemented. PPA could also be implemented while compensating publishers based on traffic as above.
Posted By Jason Dowdell at 12:22 AM
Permanent Link: PPC Click Fraud Has No Single Answer
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