On the first day Click Forensics was formed, January 2nd, 2006, we called for standards to be developed around click measurement. Our work has focused on helping to ensure advertisers get what they pay for from their Pay Per Click advertising campaigns. Standards and guidelines are a key part to making this a reality.

Today, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released the highly anticipated Click Measurement Guidelines for public comment and input. This document is the result of a task force that took form in September of 2006. Click Forensics was a founding member and along with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, LookSmart and other members of the IAB.

Since the IAB is a publisher driven organization, we have felt a responsibility to advertisers to ensure your voice is heard throughout this process. During the public comment phase, we want to help foster the advertiser’s perspective into the process. It is important for you to take time and review the document. Think about the benefits that it may have to you as a buyer and question aspects that are missing. All ideas are good ideas and the IAB and our entire task force are eager to get feedback. You can download a copy of the document and provide comments directly to the IAB here. You are also welcome to provide feedback to us directly by commenting below or via the Click Quality Council (CQC).

The Guidelines are an important foundational step for our industry. While no one document can solve the problem of click fraud or mitigate invalid traffic, it is encouraging to us to be at this point. We look forward to continuing to work to represent your voice and contribute toward build standards that enhance the value for online advertisers. We are grateful to the IAB, the Media Rating Council and all the members of the task force for the hard work put in over the last few years. Together we are making meaningful progress in building trust and making online advertising more transparent and effective.

The other day I read a great story titled “Google Devalues Everything it Touches” by Tom Foremski of the SiliconValleyWatcher summarizing a recent Charlie Rose interview on the future of journalism with the top editors from Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Daily News.

In his article, Foremski highlights some of the more interesting things the editors had to say about the quality of ads Google delivers and the impact it has on the journalism world.

One point highlighted by Foremski was made by Robert Thomson, Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal. Thomson mentions that that Google doesn’t distinguish between the quality of the content for the ads it serves up. But rather [Google] is concerned with quantity rather than quality. Co-panelist Walter Isaacson of Time seemed to agree when he said:

“Also, what Google does is it allows ads to be spread all over the Web.

You can go to Google ad servers and put ads on any site there is.”

The quality of the content on web sites where Pay Per Click ads are served is very important to the companies who pay for the ads. It’s no different from the print world where companies pay a lot more to run advertising campaigns in The Wall Street Journal than they do to run them in a weekly local tabloid. It’s not only the reach or size of the audience, but also the quality of the stories published and the audience that they atttract.

The same should be true in the online advertising world but for now it doesn’t seem that advertisers are getting much help from the search engines to make sure it happens.

An intriguing part about being on the frontlines of tracking online Pay Per Click advertising fraud is discovering how sophisticated fraudsters have become in taking advantage of a search engine’s willingness to spread ads as far and wide as possible.

Our team of click fraud forensics experts is always uncovering new schemes used to steal money from search advertisers. In today’s issue of DM News, I talk about a scheme that has troubled brand-name advertisers for the past couple years – online trademark infringement.

In its simplest form, online trademark infringement works like this. Someone buys a URL that includes the trademarked name of a well-known company or brand. A web site with the new URL is created to run Google AdSense ads. When visitors accidentally type in the URL and visit the site, they click on ads and the web site owner gets paid by Google.

A good real-world example is related to Allstate insurance. If you type www.allstateinsurance.com into your web browser, you’d expect to be taken to the official Allstate site. But instead you’re presented with a list of ads for insurance available from other companies. The bad part for the brand (in this case Allstate) is it loses that visitor as a prospective customer even though their first attempt was to get information from Allstate.

Now many of you may be thinking: how bad is this really for the advertiser? The truth is brands lose millions of dollars from this scheme every year. The hard part for the brand owner is not finding the sites that do this (the technology to track the infringing sites has been around for a couple years). Rather, it’s finding out which infringing web sites are stealing the most money so you can shut them down first.

There are several steps well-known brand names can take to protect them from infringing sites and to ensure they’re getting the most from their online ad dollars. As Pay Per Click fraud schemes like this increase more and more with the souring economy in 2009, these could help brands save some money.

It’s reaffirming to see the online media industry buck some of the recent “chicken little” pronouncements of the last few months.  While the industry isn’t out of the woods yet, it’s clear that online media in aggregate continues to perform better than its offline brethren, even as the overall global economy goes through the worst contraction of our collective lifetime.

Some recent data points:

• Google and Yahoo’s recent Q4 earnings announcements that exceeded beaten down expectations.
• A recent Ad Age post that highlighted the divergent job trends in Q4, with online media agency positions holding their own/showing slight growth against significant job loses/declines in the offline media space.
• Rumors that Q1 online media results may not be as bad as initially feared, and may actually show growth over 2008.
• Continued importance of ad networks, with more and more available inventory being filled through this aggregation channel.

While this continued, albeit slower growth is generally good news, it is coming at a price…

Even before our recent economic uncertainties, the overall online media industry was seeing an explosion of web traffic growth that has been far outpacing the migration of media dollars online.  The result has been simple supply and demand economics – overall CPMs are plummeting (see Pubmatic’s recent trend data here) as the “glut” of online media inventory creates a buyer’s market.  And, much of this web traffic growth is coming from new sources that are less desirable from a media buying standpoint – social networking sites, social media sites, etc. – that exacerbates the challenge.

So, what’s the solution?

In the near term, you’ll just see more and more media sold via performance based options – CPC and CPA.  This will allow web site publishers and traffic providers to monetize their inventory as best as possible.

In the longer term, you’ll see the development of more targeting technology and options so as to create higher value “buckets” of inventory from this vast sea of growing untargeted, “run of network” inventory.  Advances and improvements in contextual and behavioral targeting are already occurring.  And, you’re starting to see some interesting new techniques – from social media targeting (to identify mavens and influencers) and location-aware targeting (so you could be shown a Starbucks coupon/ad while you surf via WiFi at a local Starbucks) to improvements in predictive modeling/collaborative filtering.   And, you’re also seeing the rise of ad exchanges as a mechanism for aggregating these new audiences and streamlining the bidding process for bringing targeted online media buyers and sellers together.

The last piece of the puzzle, then, is to convince advertisers to increase their share of overall media budgets that they allocate online.  But, these new targeting and bid technologies alone won’t be enough to accomplish this.  It will also be important to increase advertisers’ confidence that they’re getting what they pay for through increased transparency on exactly what the advertiser is buying.

At Click Forensics, we believe that the more forward-looking ad networks will realize that transparency can be a core differentiator.  And, we’re starting to work with many of them to provide assurance to their advertisers thru 3rd party authentication and scoring that validates overall traffic quality.  This isn’t just filtering out invalid and fraudulent traffic, but using a comprehensive traffic quality management solution to actively manage and work with an ad network’s various traffic sources and partners to ensure that only qualified traffic is delivered upstream to their advertisers.  The net result is better results for advertisers, which increases overall retention and follow on media buys.  And, frankly, that’s the key to increasing overall online media allocation!

Though many external parts of the online advertising industry are quite visible, there are areas that are more difficult to see. It often itches me to understand which ad serving and tracking technologies a particular web site is using.

Ultimately, this question can be answered by manually analyzing HTML source code and digging through JavaScript include files. However, this process is often quite time consuming and tedious. I have seen many people doing it over and over again, every day, for many sites.

Recently, I discovered a more convenient way with the Firefox plugin Ghostery. Created by Compete co-founder David Cancel, it is a non-intrusive, minimalist overlay box that informs Firefox users about ad targeting and tracking technologies used on web pages visited. Here is an example from the Boing Boing blog:

At a glance, I can now immediately learn about the advertisement underpinnings of every site I visit. That actually turns out to be a lot more interesting and enjoyable than I initially thought.

Obviously, the benefits I find by using this plugin are probably coincidental. David’s initial intention with creating it was to educate web users about ad targeting technologies that are tracking user behavior across sites, often with invisible tracking images and cookies. Since launching Ghostery late last year, he has expanded the necessary tag database extensively and a small community is building around it. You can also follow Ghostery on Twitter.

After using Ghostery for a couple of weeks, I can only recommend installing the plugin for Firefox if you like to understand more about the web sites you interact with. It’s a small download and quick install. Go and start watching the invisible web!