Click Quality Council releases click quality principles

The Click Quality Council has put forward eight principles it feels are key to producing quality clicks.

by Helen Leggatt

The Click Quality Council (CQC) is made up of over 30 advertising agencies, online advertisers and click quality monitoring firms. It was formed to “discuss Pay Per Click (PPC) quality issues and to ensure their interests are represented in the development of PPC measurement standards."

The CQC has released what it believes are the eight cornerstone principles for ensuring click quality.

• 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.

"As search engines and industry groups work on the development of click quality standards, it's important they know the key principles advertisers believe should be part of any initiatives,” said Matt Greitzer, Director of Search Marketing, National Practice Lead for Avenue A | Razorfish.

“Today we have communicated the principles important to advertisers and we look forward to working with the industry to implement them so we can make search advertising better for everyone.