Yahoo! Search Marketing has entered into agreements with four web analytics providers to better enhance its reporting and help fight click fraud.
The Sunnyvale-based search engine and portal Yahoo will provide search marketing application programming interfaces to WebTrends, WebSideStory, Coremetrics, and Omniture, according to a press release. The deals will let advertisers share information on campaigns with Yahoo; in turn, Yahoo will be able to optimize campaigns and identify instances of potential click fraud.
Clients of the four analytics companies will be able to get better reports about their Yahoo advertising efforts, with the enhanced information that can be drawn via the APIs. Reports will better integrate that information, a valuable selling point for all four when targeting the advertiser market with their services.
Advertisers can permit those analytics providers to allow Yahoo Advertiser Web Services to review click activity. Click fraud has become a major concern for advertisers and ad sellers.
Competitors may try to bust an advertiser’s budget by employing scores of people or programs to click on their ads. And illicit users try to game the system for financial gain, a situation that hurts everyone.
“It’s a common misperception that search engines have all of the information necessary to identify all unwanted clicks. The fact is, advertisers possess information in their web analytics data that is proprietary to their business and can help engines detect questionable traffic,” Bryan Eisenberg, Chairman of the Web Analytics Association, said in the statement.
“Working with these four analytics partners will help Yahoo! better understand advertisers’ click activity so they all can continue to enhance and improve their global click-through protection capabilities.”
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
