The Click Quality Council is a group of advertisers which meets regularly to discuss click fraud. A few days ago they came out with their “Cornerstone Principles for Pay-Per-Click Quality Improvement” – eight requests from advertisers, similar to Jeffrey Rohrs’ Sausage Manifesto, which also collected and presented advertiser requests in January. I thought folks might be interested in where Google stands on some of their requests. Overall, depending on how they would define some of these items, it looks like we’re already doing these things. Let’s take a look.

1) Advertisers should never pay for double clicks or repeat clicks from the same session.

I agree that advertisers should not be charged for double clicks. While the activity of comparison shopping is a common reason that multiple clicks to the same ad can occur within a short period of time, if the clicks occur so close together that they could only be caused by double-clicking or malicious repeated clicking, the extra clicks clearly provide no value to the advertiser.

But “same session” is not defined here, and it would be bad for advertisers to define it in a way that would exclude comparison shopping. For example, if publishers and search engines decided not charge for multiple clicks on an ad within the same day, they would redesign their ad systems to not show that advertiser’s ad the second time a user searched on the same keyword, since showing ads which produce no revenue is not desirable. But this would deny that advertiser the opportunity to have a user who was comparison shopping revisit their site, and that would rob them of sales opportunities.

2) Advertisers should never pay for traffic from bots.

This request surprised me, since I am not aware of any company in the entire industry which has a policy of charging for clicks made by known bots. We obviously monitor for bot activity and have lists of known bots which we maintain. The difficulty is in knowing whether something is a bot. There are bots which are easily identifiable (for example, if their User-Agent value announces them as a bot) but there are also bots which nobody can identify. We have systems and processes to detect and identify bots (as well as other click fraud attempt methods, such as a click farms), but even in cases where traffic cannot be identified as coming from a specific method, our overall detection approach is still effective because it is based on analyzing data related to the clicks themselves.

3) Advertisers should have control over where, when and to whom ads are distributed.

Definitely. We provide multiple levels of control, ranging from the coarse granularity offered by geotargeting, or opting in or out of syndication or the content network, to more detailed controls such as opting out of specific URLs, which we’re the only major search engine to provide at the moment. We are also going to be releasing the ability to prevent ads from showing to specified IP addresses (see #4) in the next month.

4) Domain and IP exclusion lists from search providers should be easy to use and maintain.

I agree. We currently have URL/domain exclusion features and will be launching IP exclusion in the next month. We have and will continue to work hard to ensure features like these are easy to use. At the same time, it is important to provide advertisers with more accurate information about domains and IPs so they can make informed decisions and are not misled into thinking that Google expects them to maintain such lists in order to protect against click fraud. These are features which provide targeting controls to advertisers and are more similar to geotargeting than anything related to invalid click detection.

5) Search providers should provide advertisers detailed referrer information on all traffic that is billed.

I agree with this, and we are currently working on ways to provide advertisers with more transparency into where their ads are placed. Advertisers can already obtain referrer URLs from their own web logs, of course.

6) Advertisers should never pay for traffic originating outside the specified geo-targeted settings.

I agree with this also, but we need to be clear on what geotargeting is. Geotargeting is based on IP address and other signals and works very well, but is not perfect. There are some instances of IP addresses where geographic location cannot be determined. In addition, when an advertiser targets a specific country, our policy is to show their ads to users who are in that country as well as to users who opt into results from that country. For example, if a user chooses to use a country-specific Google site such as our French site www.google.fr, we will show them ads geotargeted to France even if their computer is located elsewhere. (A side note: Google does not have a US-specific site, and using Google.com from non-US countries will not result in the user opting into US results and ads. Instead, the geotargeting in that case will be based only on their machine location). Another example of user choice taking precedence over machine location is when a user actually types in a query which indicates they are interested in ads relevant to a specific geography, such as "paris france travel".

7) Search engines should adopt third-party validation for click quality as other media companies have done for their audience validation.

We are in favor of submitting our systems to an audit by a trusted third party, and are working with the other members of the IAB Click Measurement Working Group to set this up. The audit will likely be administered through the Media Ratings Council, the organization which audits Nielson and Arbitron. Third-party click fraud auditing firms should also be audited through the MRC to ensure they do not repeat the types of errors that have happened in the past, when fictitious clicks were included in advertiser reports. Those reports misled advertisers and advised them to make decisions which could significantly damage their businesses.

A simple example of continuing serious accounting issues with third parties: several firms have admitted to overcounting errors in the past due to fictitious clicks and have adopted Google's auto-tagging support in their systems to begin to correct the problem for analysis they do for Google advertisers. While they claim to have dealt with the problem of fictitious clicks, some of the same firms continue to publicize estimates of industry click fraud rates which include networks (such as Yahoo and MSN) where it is not yet possible to distinguish between fictitious clicks and real clicks (due to lack of support similar to Google's auto-tagging).

8) Search providers should provide an easy mechanism to reconcile paid clicks on a monthly basis.

Definitely. Google provides this through auto-tagging, which allows advertisers (and third party analytics firms, including click fraud auditing firms) to reconcile the clicks they see in their logs with the number of clicks in their AdWords reports. Using auto-tagging, advertisers (and third-party firms) are able to get accurate information on how many clicks occurred on their campaigns and how those figures compare to the activity seen in their logs. This allows them to properly count clicks and avoid the problem of fictitious clicks we have discussed before.

Google also provides our advertisers with reports of the daily number of invalid clicks on their campaigns, which is what they (and third-party auditing firm) need to verify whether the number of clicks they thought were suspicious was less than or equal to the number of clicks we already filtered out for them that day.

We are the only company in the industry that currently provides either of these features, but we have been working on evangelizing them to our competitors and the industry overall. MSN has announced that they will be releasing their version of invalid clicks reporting later this year, but none of the other major search engines has yet adopted a feature like auto-tagging. We hope both of these will become part of the IAB standards. We have also been working on plans to share detailed click information, similar to a phone bill as many in the industry have pointed out. It would contain information such as the IP addresses, time, and cost associated with individual clicks. It would not contain flags for which specific clicks were detected as invalid (and not charged for), since that would make it simple for a fraudster to pose as an advertiser, run an experiment with millions of clicks, and then attempt to reverse engineer our system. But this type of report would provide advertisers further transparency into which clicks occurred on their ads and more easily identify discrepencies between their systems and ours.

Many thanks to the advertisers who provided their suggestions, as well as to all of the other groups that send us ideas regularly. We benefit greatly from the feedback our advertisers provide us, as it helps us constantly improve our systems and customer service, and we would always like to get more. In fact, we are hosting our first advertiser forum dedicated exclusively to invalid clicks at Google headquarters this coming week. In it, we will be meeting with several dozen advertisers, both large and not-so-large, to discuss their concerns, share information about our invalid click detection methods and policies, and come up with ways to continue to deliver a great advertising experience on Google.