New York — In a weird development that looked impossible two years back, search engine giant Google Inc. last week agreed to cooperate publicly with Click Forensics, a click-fraud detection company with which it has had a rocky relationship.
At the SMX East Conference, Click Forensics, Inc., the industry leader in scoring, auditing and managing traffic quality for the online advertising community, last week said that search engine behemoth Google Inc. has decided to accept the electronically generated click-quality reports generated by the Click Forensics FACTr service.
The latest feature generates updated reports on possible trademark abusers who use well-known brand names to generate Pay Per Click (PPC) traffic. This indicates the process of documenting click-fraud instances and submitting reports to Google will be significantly automated and simplified for advertisers that use the FACTr service.
The newly announce Click Forensics quality assurance feature, following a successful launch with Yahoo!, the FACTr program now extends support to Google, MIVA and LookSmart and for other leading search and advertisers to identify and track organizations and individuals illegally using trademarked names for search marketing campaigns. Organizations can now take advantage of the new solution to promptly take action to protect intellectual property and their own search marketing investments.
The FACTr service, which stands for Fully Automated Click Tracking Reconciliation, allows advertisers to put forward invalid traffic and click fraud evidence reports automatically to search providers and content networks in order to speed account reconciliation and credit request investigations.
Yahoo! was the first search provider to embark on accepting FACTr reports back in July following a six month pilot.
Trademark infringement in Pay Per Click is an increasing and highly-perceptible problem on content networks and major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Offenders commonly register domains containing recognized brand names and then display ads on them that generate traffic and PPC ad revenue. Consumers often see the results when mistyping a web site URL only to find themselves on a different web site with lots of ads and pop-ups.
“LookSmart has long been committed to search traffic quality, and to being a smart choice for search advertisers,” said Jonathan Ewert, general manger of advertiser networks at LookSmart. “Since 2004, when we co-founded an industry panel to develop standards and practices for improving search traffic quality, LookSmart has continuously improved the quality of our network. We see Click Forensics FACTr as a significant development to provide assurance of the quality traffic we already deliver to advertisers.”
“The Trademark Use report from Click Forensics is another effective weapon in the battle to improve search advertising traffic quality,” said Mike Brown, Vice President of Internet Marketing for VEGAS.com, the official Vegas travel site. “It enables advertisers to more quickly identify and stop trademark infringement online, which helps boost the performance of pay per click advertising initiatives.”
Google and Click Forensics appear to be weird individuals. Both the companies have in the past argued over the subject of click fraud, and the speechifying has often approached ugly territory.
Google has charged Click Forensics of being incompetent in its methodology and misleading in its results in order to make the problem seem bigger than it is. In the meantime, Click Forensics has blamed that Google has purposefully trivialized click fraud and mischaracterized it as a minor problem.
Appearing in the skirmishes have been Click Forensics President and Founder Tom Cuthbert and Google’s expert on click fraud, Shuman Ghosemajumder.
“The forceful effects of trademark infringement in search advertising goes beyond consumer annoyance,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “It is affecting the advertising budgets of major brands as they are forced to spend more money to get the high-quality search traffic that is rightly theirs. We are helping to change that by giving brands a tool they can use to fight back.”
Click fraud occurs when someone clicks on an ad with malicious intent. For example, a competitor may click on a rival’s pay-per-click ads in order to drive up their ad spending. Or a publisher may click on pay-per-click ads on its site to trigger more commissions.
Google collects almost all of its revenue from the type of online advertising that is most vulnerable to click fraud — pay-per-click ads that appear along with relevant search results or in Web pages of relevant content.
Google declined to comment for this article, but Click Forensics’ Pellman said his company welcomes Google’s cooperation in the FACTr (Fully Automated Click Tracking Reconciliation) service.
“From our standpoint, this is the first opportunity in which we have been able to implement something specific with Google, which is great,” Pellman said.
The Trademark Use report works by identifying registered domains using trademarked names. It is a feature of the Click Forensics for Advertisers solution, which uses patent-pending analytics and live campaign data from the Click Fraud Network to identify and filter out sources of click fraud and poor quality traffic before it affects online advertising campaigns. Similar to a spam filter, Click Forensics for Advertisers delivers regular updates on new sites and sources perpetrating click fraud, trademark infringement or those sending bad traffic to clients and members.
“Customers can now electronically submit a detailed evidence report in the format in which Google wants it, which is different from the format in which Yahoo wants it. And Google will accept that report and respond back,” Pellman said.
“We trust that FACTr reports will help us build on our existing traffic quality processes and improve ROI for participating advertisers,” said S. Brian Mukherjee, SVP & Group Managing Director, of MIVA.
In addition to Google, Click Forensics also announced last week that Miva and LookSmart are now also supporting FACTr.
Click Forensics, which reports on click-fraud incidence every quarter, recently said that the overall industry average for click fraud was 16.2 percent in the second quarter of this year. “We continue to see click fraud as a big challenge for advertisers,” Pellman said.
Fraudsters are becoming more refined and trying to make their scams harder to detect and track, lately resorting to using botnets to perpetrate click fraud, he said. “Click fraud is a big, consistent problem and it is not going away,” Pellman said.
Joseph Cowan, senior search strategist at Outrider, a search-engine marketing agency, said it would have been unheard of not long ago for Google to let itself be identified as a Click Forensics collaborator.
“Two years back, it was a very hostile relationship,” said Cowan, whose company helps advertisers manage campaigns on Google and other search ad networks.
Gaining this insight, backed up by hard data from Click Forensics, enabled Outrider to further optimize its clients’ campaigns, Cowan said. And the more confident a company is about the effectiveness of its search ad campaigns, the more it will invest in them, which is good for all parties involved, Google included.
“By buying into this, Google is simply accepting the fact that it is good to have a third party review [its ad campaigns] so that someone not connected to their company is also saying ‘yes, it is working,’” Cowan said.
For additional information on Click Forensics for Advertisers and its new Trademark Infringement reporting feature, visit www.clickforensics.com.