"A Need for Third-Party Click Auditing"

By David Reeve
dreeve@webvisible.com
WebVisible
www.webvisible.com

Open your browser and Yahoo! the phrase "All we can do is all we can do".

The results show it's a clichéd sermon that is often shrugged when fighting an insurmountable enemy. Most indexed uses of the cliché remorse about Katrina and the brave clean-up efforts in Louisiana, and to a lesser degree among the eighty results, you'll find the cliché used in perpetual tales of lost battles on a Star Wars Fan Fiction website, a son reeling from the effects of a parent's dementia, a Mormon mother's losing battle with her son and the steel piercing in his eyebrow, and the inevitable weight loss reference.

If it's not on the Internet, then it doesn't exist, so let me be the first that I know of to apply this cliché to online advertising's battle against (whisper) "click fraud".

All we can do is all we can do.

Click fraud can occur in a variety of different forms, from the now familiar story of the cross-town rival that clicks the banner ads of a competing business to deplete said competitors ad budget, to sinister bots that roam the web programmed to click on costly links associated with advertisers, to Search Engine Marketing firms that receive search analytics from search engines then report inflated phantom clicks to the paying customers, driving up revenue for the firm, while the customers ROI withers. Each of these behaviors drives up costs on keywords, discourages customers, and casts darkening clouds of suspicion on the entire industry. Click fraud must be corralled in every way possible.

A need has arisen for independent, third-party audit of click recording and reporting analytics by companies that aggregate clicks on a large scale from multiple search engines, in order to provide verifiable results to local merchant advertisers. Third-party auditing can protect local merchant advertisers from paying for phantom clicks tacked on by unethical marketing firms that aim to embellish analytics and deceive customers, with an upside of raising consumer confidence in the integrity of online marketing services.

It's important to acknowledge the relevance of the audit to local merchant campaigns versus national. National campaigns view click fraud differently than local.

National campaigns serving online retail outlets look at direct conversions through their website, which can easily be tracked as an online shopping cart moves from one stage to the next. A national online retail campaign is more likely to view an ad campaign's value in overall ROI, overshadowing any waste attributed to click fraud. By contrast, local merchants watch each click and scrutinize for fraud, as each click represents a larger and more personal advertising investment to the local merchant.

Local business websites are not as sophisticated and often are not capable of converting clicks into sales. They often need to receive a phone call or have a customer walk through the door in order to close a sale. Local businesses can't track the conversion of each click and ROI in the same way larger nationals can. Therefore, everything must be done to ensure consistency in the number of clicks generated and the number of clicks sold to the local merchant.

Impartial third-party auditing firms granted complete access to the recording and reporting logs of search marketing firms can effectively verify the consistency of the data received from the search engine, which is in turn sold to the local merchant.

When selecting a third-party auditing service, the following parameters should be respected:

1. The third-party audit must use a randomly selected number of accounts, without the input or direction of SEM firm employees or representatives. The results of the audit can dictate the scope of future audits, whereas a larger number of test accounts can be used for more vigorous auditing, if needed.
2. A segment of the test accounts should be for websites that sell online or (virtually) as well as traditional brick and mortar shops.
3. Samples should represent a variety of Designated Market Areas.
4. The audit should match the number of clicks reported on the advertiser's monthly report with: a) the internal account level report of monthly click activity and, b) monthly reports from individual campaigns maintained on search partners' websites or via files attained from search partners that contain daily click logs.

The findings will be the accuracy percentage calculated for the audit period representing the net difference between the clicks reported by SEM firms to advertisers compared to the search click activity obtained from the search engine partners.

One final thought…can tracking one's own website analytics reveal truth in advertising? A wide variety of analytics software and services continue to try consumer confidence, most recently with Google's $30 million acquisition of Urchin, which is now being offered free to members. Yet, inconsistency is a killer. Without an industry standard that determines the use of filtering mechanisms and algorithms, no two analytics providers will show the same results on a given account.

Our own private research shows a wide gap in analytics reporting from the top brands, with discrepancies in 4% to 80% of the data. Under these circumstances, advertisers are likely to record analytics that differ - perhaps greatly - than those presented to them by their marketing firm, or anyone else for that matter. It is our hope that we can continue to work with the industry to define expectations of performance and establish industry-wide standards, similar to the performance standards and deviations currently recognized by the IAB.