WebProNews » Traffic Quality

Yahoo Enhances Ad Traffic Quality

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 11:47:45 +0000

A new option for Yahoo’s advertisers allows them to have better control of where their ads appear on Yahoo’s Publishing Network.

Yahoo Enhances Ad Traffic Quality

Not every site eligible to display advertising from the Yahoo Publishing Network may be a desirable destination for every advertiser. For whatever reason, traffic from a particular domain doesn’t provide a marketer with the best benefits.

Yahoo addressed this by making a new feature available for its search marketing clients. The company’s top click quality officer, Reggie Davis, posted about it on the Yahoo Search Marketing blog:

The new Blocked Domains feature, which launches later this month, is just the latest among several initiatives we are undertaking in order to in order to provide increased value. Others include:

Discounts
You may automatically receive pricing discounts based on our assessment of the quality of traffic coming from our partner distribution network.

Click protection
We have installed a system to track and identify clicks that we believe shouldn

Google Opens Traffic Quality Center

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 12:03:41 +0000

Google’s debut of the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center closely follows the arrival of a similar service from Yahoo.

Google Opens Traffic Quality Center

Click fraud persists in plaguing advertisers and the search advertising companies that sell ad space. High-profile lawsuits have happened as a result of businesspeople contending not enough is being done to keep their budgets from being tapped with illicit clicks.

With trust occupying an important part of any online advertising product, Google and its competitors have to work hard to stay ahead of the various grifters, thieves, and assorted criminals who would loot their ad clients. They haven’t always been very communicative about their work, claiming that the bad guys would profit from information about anti-click fraud efforts.

That position hasn’t satisfied advertisers nor the many third party companies that attempt to track click fraud independently of the search companies. Google and others generally refuse to give up information on their anti-fraud efforts, citing the benefit of such transparency to those who would game the system.

Room for improvement in discussing the click fraud issue has existed for some time. Yahoo opened a Traffic Quality center last week, and now Google has followed suit.

Much of the information Google presents in its Ad Traffic Quality pages has been seen before. Google claims it proactively finds all but about .02 percent of what turn out to be invalid clicks. Advertisers who find and report invalid clicks can be reimbursed by Google after those clicks have been confirmed invalid.

Google suggested a way advertisers can help themselves against click fraud. “Advertisers should have a working definition of ROI that is trackable. For advertisers that are not selling products directly online, try to define some intermediate step (e.g. filling out a form) as a proxy for a conversion,” they said.

Another section of the Traffic Quality center focuses on some of the technical discussions on click fraud. It includes articles by Google staffers about click fraud, and references to official and unofficial blogs by Google and by people like Matt Cutts and Shuman Ghosemajumder, both noteworthy Googlers on the topic of click fraud.

Yahoo Opens Traffic Quality Center

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 17:39:52 +0000

Click fraud and its related issues form the focal point for a newly-opened point of reference at Yahoo Search Marketing.

Yahoo touted its proprietary Click Protection System as the most stringent in the industry, in their humble opinion. If it is that, VP Reggie Davis and the development team have been really busy.

Some of their efforts receive a little publicity on the Traffic Quality Center, recently opened at Yahoo Search Marketing. The company provided some insights into the ways they protect advertising customers.

They also offered a peak at what is to come with their search marketing platform. On quality based pricing:

Later in 2007, we plan to apply quality-based pricing to a broader group of keywords.

There’s nothing you need to do to take advantage of quality-based pricing. Discounts are applied automatically based on Yahoo!’s Quality Based Pricing technology.

On domain blocking:

While quality-based pricing provides discounts based on traffic performance, you might identify certain domains that you don’t want to receive traffic from due to branding considerations or other reasons. To help meet this need, we plan to launch a product that will provide our advertisers with the controls and tools to block their ads from appearing on certain domains.

Advertisers who want to report possible click fraud but aren’t familiar with the procedure can view a walkthrough of the process on the Traffic Quality Center website. Yahoo said they will contact the submitter within 48 hours, and will try to resolve the issue within ten business days.