Jon Myers, Director of Search Insight, Latitude Group
What is Click Fraud? It is an internet fraud.
He shows how Eric Schmidt told people to let click fraud happen.
There is click fraud, he shares some stats, but the stats are very debatable, on who you ask.
He shows how the media is now involved in click fraud.
This will lead to hype, confusion and concern.
Google took a stance quit quickly, such as running a report on "invalid clicks." Google does click quality adjustments. Google also talks about issues at their Inside AdWords blog.
Microsoft does very well and they have nice screens and reports.
Yahoo, he only has good things to say. He mentioned Reggie's Yahoo's click guide, was in the audience. They launched a click quality center.
There click auditing companies and councils out there. There are so many out there and they keep growing. There is the Click Quality Council and it is a great thing to see.
The victims are client and advertisers, SEMs and agencies are victims also. And search engines are victims also, because there is a limited volume.
Tom Cuthbert, President & CEO, Click Forensics is next up.
Yahoo launched traffic quality center and so did Google. And he is happy to see this.
He explains that Google has changed their top placement formula. They are putting a heavy weight on cost for those ads.
He shares the recent results from the Click Quality Center, see http://searchengineland.com/070719-085703.php
70% of those sites in YPN are made for ad sites or private domains on Google side is it 76%.
ClickScore is a process of looking at each click. The average score is 581 for search and 390 for the content network, and the higher the number the better. They are introducing ANA SiteScore, this will look at a site and give the site a score. ANA is AdNEtworkAdvisor, and it is in a beta right now.
When questioned, he said he has no idea where Google gets their numbers. He doesnt know why there is such a big discrepancy between their numbers and Google's numbers.
John Linden, Chief Technology Officer, Think Partnership to talk about the opportunities out there.
(1) The first step is to know if this user (IP address) have a history of problems. Remove countries or low quality user agents. This is the most least affective step.
(2) FeedPatrol uses a client side validation script to help identify bots and/or scripts from real users. Most bots use real IPS and variable traffic patterns, and mixture of known user agents.
(3) They use client side validation to help identify if the user intend to click on your ad or not.
(4) Even legitimate clicks can underperform for advertisers
The systems feed off each other, so you need sever side tied to client side checks.
Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media Inc. is last up.
How many of you were thinking of click fraud in 2002? Not many raised their hands. She explains most of you do not know how people have been dealing with the issue historically.
So she shares some stories about the history (Sorry, not sharing those stories).
She would like to see more information for the data that they have. They are telling us what they are not billing us for. What she wants to see the conversion data and how that comes into play. Give us more data on how conversions play in click fraud.
