The Click Quality Council has released a list of eight principles they believe should act as a blueprint for creating industry-wide click quality.
The industry average click fraud rate for 2006 was 14.2 percent according to Click Forensics.
The eight principles for ensuring click quality is the result of a six-month effort by the Click Quality Council members to highlight key elements needed to bring adequate quality in pay-per-click advertising campaigns.
1) Advertisers should never pay for double clicks or repeat clicks from the same session.
2) Advertisers should never pay for traffic from bots.
3) Advertisers should have control over where, when and to whom ads are distributed.
4) Domain and IP exclusion lists from search providers should be easy to use and maintain.
5) Search providers should provide advertisers detailed referrer information on all traffic that is billed.
6) Advertisers should never pay for traffic originating outside the specified geo-targeted settings.
7) Search engines should adopt third-party validation for click quality as other media companies have done for their audience validation.
8) Search providers should provide an easy mechanism to reconcile paid clicks on a monthly basis.
“As search engines and industry groups work on the development of click quality standards, it’s important they know the key principles advertisers believe should be part of any initiatives,” said Matt Greitzer, director of Search Marketing, National Practice Lead for Avenue A | Razorfish.
“Today we have communicated the principles important to advertisers and we look forward to working with the industry to implement them so we can make search advertising better for everyone.”
