An Open Letter to Paid Search Networks

Search marketer and “recovering attorney” Jeff Rohrs has published The Sausage Manifesto, an open letter to paid search providers asking critical questions about billing practices, transparency, click fraud and other issues. He asks a number of pointed questions, then lists eleven requests that he says failure to respond to could damage the industry. His requests:

1. Talk, Don’t Lecture
2. Appreciate Our Unique Circumstances
3. Invest in Proportion to the Problem
4. Acknowledge that Tracking Alone Is Not the Answer
5. Improve Click Quality Customer Service
6. Build a Click Quality Education Resource Center
7. Light a Fire Under the IAB
8. Play Nice with Others
9. Put Somebody in Jail
10. Create a Click Fraud Perp Registry
11. Put Your Data Where Your PR Is

Jeff has enabled comments on the manifesto, and there’s a good discussion going on, including a response from John Slade, Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Senior Director of Product Management who speaks frequently on the click fraud panels moderated by Jeff at Search Engine Strategies.

Postscript: Although Google hasn’t commented on the Sausage Manifesto site, Shuman Ghosemajumder, who heads the click quality team at Google, responded to many of the points raised by Rohrs over on the SEW blog: Google’s Response to “The Sausage Manifesto”.