Principles to Ensure Click Quality

The Click Quality Council™, an independent group of leading online advertisers, advertising agencies and click quality monitoring firms, published a list of eight principles it believes should serve as the foundation for ensuring industry-wide click quality. The development of the eight core principles for ensuring click quality is the result of a six month effort by Click Quality Council members to identify the key elements needed to deliver adequate quality in pay-per-click advertising campaigns. The eight cornerstone principles include:

Principles to Ensure Click Quality

1. Advertisers should never pay for double clicks or repeat clicks from the same session.
2. Advertisers should never pay for traffic from bots.
3. Advertisers should have control over where, when and to whom ads are distributed.
4. Domain and IP exclusion lists from search providers should be easy to use and maintain.
5. Search providers should provide advertisers detailed referrer information on all traffic that is billed.
6. Advertisers should never pay for traffic originating outside the specified geo-targeted settings.
7. Search engines should adopt third-party validation for click quality as other media companies have done for their audience validation.
8. Search providers should provide an easy mechanism to reconcile paid clicks on a monthly basis.

View the Click Quality Council news release

View the Current Industry Report Card

"As search engines and industry groups work on the development of click quality standards, it's important they know the key principles advertisers believe should be part of any initiatives. Today we have communicated the principles important to advertisers and we look forward to working with the industry to implement them so we can make search advertising better for everyone."
- Matt Greitzer
Director of Search Marketing, National Practice Lead for Avenue A | Razorfish

"We believe it's essential to listen to input from advertisers, and we think the principles outlined by the Click Quality Council today are an important step in furthering industry dialogue about traffic quality. Yahoo! will consider these principles carefully as we develop new features and provide additional transparency to help advertisers better understand the value of their search marketing campaigns."
- Reggie Davis
Vice President of Marketplace Quality, Yahoo! Inc.

"The work of the Click Quality Council is important to the entire online advertising community. Click fraud is a real issue that online retailers face every day. By agreeing on these principles now, search providers will have an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to improving the effectiveness for all online advertisers."
- Bill McClellan, Vice President of Government Affairs, Electronic Retailing Association

"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." Read more
- Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety at Google

Progress is being made in the battle against invalid and fraudulent clicks.  Major search providers have agreed to participate in the Click Measurement Working Group as part of an Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) initiative.  The purpose of this group is to “provide the detailed definition of a “click” and the standard against which clicks are measured and counted including the identification of invalid clicks and/or fraudulent clicks.”

 The initiative set out by the IAB is a step in the right direction.  Click Forensics goal is to ensure that the voice of the advertisers is represented in this process.  To accomplish this we have invited a group of leading advertisers and agencies to join an informal group called the Click Quality Council (CQC).