Subject: Perhaps the click audits are not providing sufficient consideration the tendency of consumer research.

From: Leila <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 04:42:36 +0300

Because of our investment in click fraud protection systems, we are able
to manage this issue very well and prevent it from having an impact on
the vast majority of AdWords advertisers. Click fraud protection is
something we take very seriously at Google, and it requires a high
level of scientific rigor to do well.

Google can count ad clicks reliably as a click on a Google ad will
cause the web browser to contact Google and then we redirect it to the
advertiser's landing page.

ROI is the same on average - and not by accident, but because we
automatically provide discounts to advertisers to make it so.

I thought folks might be interested in where Google stands on some of
their requests.

These are features which provide targeting controls to advertisers and
are more similar to geotargeting than anything related to invalid click
detection.

Perhaps it hasn't yet been fully or correctly utilized, so the
significant corrective drop in their numbers is yet to come. If you
browse through the links on NetIdentity's home page, you will find
various explanations of why they register other people's names in order
to "share them with the world".

Or perhaps their network is heavily skewed toward non-Google
advertisers, and thus they still cannot correct the problem until
Yahoo, MSN and others implement their own versions of auto-tagging. We
also found that in other instances, clicks classified as "click fraud"
by third-party firms produced sales at the same rate as the "good"
clicks. Because of our investment in click fraud protection systems, we
are able to manage this issue very well and prevent it from having an
impact on the vast majority of AdWords advertisers. There are too many
horror stories of people's accounts being closed when they did nothing
wrong.

And yet, if I were to go back to Google and click through again, that
click through would be recorded - in fact, it was: aaa. Unfortunately
those are the firms that you don't read about very much, since they
would never promote flawed industry estimates in order to attract
business. Opinions on this web site are the author's own.

If you ask me, these are the people who have committed click fraud in
the past and now are angry that Google and Yahoo have terminated their
accounts. We obviously monitor for bot activity and have lists of known
bots which we maintain.

The Media Ratings Council, which audits Nielsen, is an integral part of
the IAB effort. Google and third-party consultants need to realise that
you will not convince anyone with proprietary analytics and that arguing
over semantics at this point is only damaging the industry's image.