Google Responds To Click Quality Council’s 8 Principles For PPC Improvement

Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s business product manager for Trust & Safety at Google, has responded via his blog to the Click Quality Council’s Cornerstone Principles for Pay-Per-Click Quality Improvement (PDF file) that were released last week.

The response is basically what you expected to see. Shuman lists out all of the points in the 8 principles and responds that he typically agrees, shows how Google complies (or will comply) with each point. But let me pull out some areas that might not be simple “I agree” statements.

In response to principle number one, “Advertisers should never pay for double clicks or repeat clicks from the same session,” Shuman agreed but said, “but ‘same session’ is not defined here, and it would be bad for advertisers to define it in a way that would exclude comparison shopping.”

On principle number five, “Search providers should provide advertisers detailed referrer information on all traffic that is billed.” Shuman did agree and explained that Google is “currently working on ways to provide advertisers with more transparency into where their ads are placed,” which is nice to hear.

Principle number six asks, “Advertisers should never pay for traffic originating outside the specified geo-targeted settings.” Shuman explains that the technology of geotargeting “works very well, but is not perfect.”

In principle number seven, the Quality Click Council says “Search engines should adopt third-party validation for click quality as other media companies have done for their audience validation.” In response to that, Shuman asks that these third-party auditing firms be audited as well, by “the MRC to ensure they do not repeat the types of errors that have happened in the past, when fictitious clicks were included in advertiser reports.”

Postscript: Search Engine Watch has a response from Yahoo’s Reggie Davis, VP of marketplace quality, on this saying:

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.