August 04 2006

IAB brings main search engines together to combat click fraud

While click fraud is widely suspected and notoriously difficult and expensive to detect and eliminate, the key issue is one of confidence: are advertisers still happy to commit budgets to PPC? The IAB and MRC, along with the Googles, Yahoos, Asks of the world have agreed a new standard. Yippee.

The IAB's press release gushes rather in an overly self-congratulatory fashion:

"I applaud the IAB for continuing to take a leadership role in the creation of Measurement Guidelines across all platforms of the Interactive medium," said George Ivie, Executive Director and CEO, Media Rating Council. "Agencies and marketers should feel assured that the Interactive industry is striving for increased reliability and consistency through the guideline-setting process and through their support for audits."

Fair enough - but what does this mean for retailers ie the people paying for the ads?

We hear that:

"Click Measurement is the next phase of the Interactive industry's groundbreaking Global Measurement Guidelines initiative," says Greg Stuart CEO of the IAB. "These guidelines demonstrate our continued commitment to being the most accountable advertising medium and providing marketers with the highest possible level of transparency."

Phew - "global measurement".

The move, from an advertiser's perspective, must be welcomed I suppose, but the true evaluation of ad campaigns must be ROI - profitability based on the cost of acquisition per goods sold, less returns. All other transactional, granular options are clearly less desirable that this.