Common Enemy

Yahoo! and Click Forensics team up to fight click fraud

The enemy of your enemy is supposed to be your friend, right? Well, the biggest enemy of Yahoo!’s traffic quality team is click fraud, which is why we’ve just become friends with click-audit company Click Forensics.

We’ve teamed up with Click Forensics, a well-known click auditor that attempts to track click fraud numbers, including publishing quarterly discard rates. The obvious question is, why would we work with a company that has been a critic of search marketing? Because, frankly, we care so much about click quality that we’re willing to work with anybody who can help us—and our advertisers—drive a better return-on-investment.

About the Partnership

How will we work together? In this new partnership, Click Forensics can act as an intermediary for advertisers and work with us on specific advertiser issues when advertisers request help from both of us.

Click Forensics generally provides a way to help advertisers understand their click data, and now can provide Yahoo! with more information on behalf of the advertiser if there is a question about traffic quality. If you are already a Click Forensics customer, you can also use your Click Forensics reports as the basis of click investigations.

Click Forensics can provide us with additional data that may help us update our traffic-quality measures, so even if you’re not a Click Forensics customer, you can still benefit.

What We Do for You

This fits in pretty nicely with what we’re already doing. Our Click Protection System, one of the best in the industry, typically discards between 12 and 15 percent of clicks before you pay for them.

Coming soon, you’ll be able to see for yourself the clicks that our system identifies and doesn’t charge you for. Our new Click Filter report will show you how many total clicks are being discarded, and the percentage of your total these clicks represent.

Of course, dealing with click fraud is not all we’re doing to improve traffic quality, whether it’s pricing discounts on traffic from certain partner sites, or the ability to block domains from which you don’t want to receive traffic.  But when it comes to getting insight that could improve our traffic quality, a little extra help is always a good thing.

– Reggie Davis, VP of network quality