I asked Dennis Susay, Yahoo’s Regional Head of Marketing for SEA, about the availability of a publisher program for international webmasters, like Google’s Adsense at CMO 2007. He replied that it would be offered with Yahoo’s new Panama platform sometime in August this year. While publishers will rejoice at this news, advertisers now have to be extra cautious about “click fraud”. In addition to sponsored links in search engine results, your pay-per-click ads will also show on publisher websites determined through Yahoo’s content match technology. For example, your shoe ad may show on somebody’s shoe blog. If a visitor clicks on the ad, Yahoo charges you for the click and pays the publisher a portion of the fee as commission. Therein lies the problem - a conflict of interest between the advertiser and the publisher. What is click fraud? Click fraud occurs when someone clicks on your ad even when they do not have any genuine interest in your product, message, etc. Since the publisher earns a commission for each click, he/she may encourage visitors to click on the ad, use an automated script or click on the ads themselves. Although there are complex checks to minimize click fraud, like the number of clicks per hour and number of clicks from an IP address, it remains a big problem for advertisers. While Google puts the percentage of fraudulent clicks at “less than 10%”, Yahoo’s Reggie Davis has estimated their’s as high as 15%. This problem is compounded by: What can you do about click fraud as an advertiser? You can set your ad to ONLY display on search engine results and not 3rd party publisher websites. Still, there’s nothing much you can do about competitors clicking on your ad except to enter this as a consideration when planning your PPC campaign. In the meantime, let’s hope that Google, Yahoo and MSN come up with better algorithms to combat the problem.
- competitors of publishers who want to see them get booted out of a publisher program.
- competitors of advertisers who want them to lose advertising dollars through click fraud.