Google have announced several new initiatives designed to enhance their pay-per-click advertising services and reduce click fraud. A service, to be available from April will give online advertisers the option to prohibit their pay-per-click ads from being seen by competitors.
Google defines click fraud as "invalid clicks, as any method used to artificially and/or maliciously generate clicks or page impressions", going further to specify: "manual clicks on an ad to purposefully increase the ad spend; deliberate clicks on an ad to increase profits by site owners hostings the ads; and automated clicking tools, 'bots, or other deception software".
It has long been suspected that click fraud is rife and that competitors have driven up the cost of their counterpart's online advertising budgets by manually or automatically clicking on the ads, therefore increasing the bid price of keywords used in the ad. By allowing advertisers to identify IP addresses that should not receive the ads it is hoped that the initiative will reduce click fraud - and reduce online advertising budgets from increasing unnecessarily.
Google maintain that click fraud is not as commonplace as others in the industry declare - but Google will also be offering data to companies about how much money they are saving by filtering out suspicious clicks.
The second initiative to combat click fraud is currently being tested using US companies. A new pay-per-action system could be the answer: advertisers will be asked for ad payments if the click results in a product purchase or subscription to a newsletter - basically when an action arises as a result of the initial click to the sponsored site. If the online advertising community is satisfied that this method implies human intervention as opposed to a software program automatically clicking on a site, then this model could be the answer to addressing the issue of click fraud.
We will keep you updated on the results of the beta testing...
privacy and cookies policy