Industry Group Proposes Eight Principles To Ensure Click Quality

The Click Quality Council, a group of online advertisers, advertising agencies and click quality monitoring firms formed to propose and help establish standards for search advertising quality, has proposed eight principles for ensuring industry-wide click quality. The principles are the result of a six month effort by independent members of the ad-hoc group to identify the key elements needed to deliver adequate quality in pay-per-click advertising campaigns.

The eight principles include:

• Advertisers should never pay for double clicks or repeat clicks from the same session.
• Advertisers should never pay for traffic from bots.
• Advertisers should have control over where, when and to whom ads are distributed.
• Domain and IP exclusion lists from search providers should be easy to use and maintain.
• Search providers should provide advertisers detailed referrer information on all traffic that is billed.
• Advertisers should never pay for traffic originating outside the specified geo-targeted settings.
• Search engines should adopt third-party validation for click quality as other media companies have done for their audience validation.
• Search providers should provide an easy mechanism to reconcile paid clicks on a monthly basis.

More information on the principles, including an online video with commentary on the principles from Click Quality Council members, advertisers and agencies including Frank Watson, Kris Jones, Daron Babin, Bruce Clay, Kevin Lee and Jim Hedger, is available here.