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Industry Trends

Yahoo! Gets Serious About Click Fraud

By August 14, 2007July 30th, 20233 Comments

The Yahoo! Search Marketing blog announced the launch of a Traffic Quality Center to help combat click fraud and “build the highest quality ad network possible”. The new site address is:

Traffic Quality Center

Visitors to the site will learn how to submit a click investigation request, access tips and tools to detect click fraud and read news stories and articles about click fraud and best practices to protect their companies’ search marketing investment. Yahoo! promises to make information that sheds light on traffic quality issues from many different perspectives available on the site.

Changing More Than Perceptions

Will this actually change anything in the way they handle customer requests for click quality reviews? This question should be foremost in the minds of most search advertising professionals who choose to use the Yahoo! platform.

While the effort is noble, the fact remains that no online site will improve the advertiser experience of having to deal with less-than-intelligent Yahoo!Search Marketing representatives. Nor will the website increase the amount of money advertisers get refunded by Yahoo! due to fraudulent click on their account. It could in fact, very easily just end up being a soapbox for them to trumpet how conscientious they are about delivering quality traffic, but doing nothing concrete about refunding companies whose marketing budgets have paid for fraudulent clicks.

News Update: Google Catches Up

Two days after Yahoo! launched the Traffic Quality Center, their main rival, Google, have gone and launched their own version, called the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center:

Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center

Looking at the lackluster appearance of Google’s offering, one might almost wonder if they didn’t just slap together something quickly and put it out there in an attempt to not be outdone by the competition!