"Our goal is to ensure that the voice of the online advertising community is heard when it comes to developing industry standards that will define click measurement guidelines. Members of the Click Quality Council and online advertisers feel the impact invalid and fraudulent clicks are having on their online campaigns everyday. Their first-hand insight and experience will prove invaluable to the development of standards and our work with the IAB. We continue to work closely with Council members to help with this important initiative."



Tom Cuthbert

Moderator, Click Quality Council

President and founder, Click Forensics, Inc.

Read Tom's blog post: Building on a Foundation of Success: IAB Guidelines.


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.