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Search marketing: The insights are in the data

Rosemary Lising, Managing Director, GroupM Search Asia Pacific writes for iMedia: The Wisdom Hierarchy provides a framework and approach towards deriving better consumer insights from our search programs. Gone are the days of tracking standard campaign metrics and regurgitating the numbers. Driving a search program forward means we need to better understand customer insights, and have the guts to act on that knowledge. Without the ability to provide judgment and analysis, the numbers will remain as numbers. More...

In US, IAB Commends First Media Companies on Passing Audits for Standardizing Click Measurement

NEW YORK (July 23, 2009) — Recognizing the need to protect buyers, sellers and ultimately all consumers from click fraud, the interactive advertising industry has made it a priority to standardize click-count measurement across media companies. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today applauded Business.com, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! for being the first organizations to pass audits for the IAB’s recently released Click Measurement Guidelines. Issued last month, the guidelines provide a rigorous methodology for companies to define and measure valid clicks and identify and eliminate fraudulent ones, establishing parameters for the accurate buying and selling of cost-per-click advertising.

Independent, third-party audits that certify media companies against the Click Measurement Guidelines provide assurance to buyers of online media that those audited companies are adhering to high standards of rigor and transparency in their click-counting methodologies.

“The three largest search engines represent more than 95 percent of all U.S. searches, which in the month of May 2009 equaled more than 13 billion searches. Completing those companies’ click measurement audits represents a significant milestone in the war on click fraud,” said Joe Laszlo, research director of the IAB. More...

In US, Click Forensics launches feature to target high-quality online traffic sources to improve Search campaign performance

AUSTIN, Texas – May 8, 2009 – Click Forensics™, Inc., the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community, today announced the immediate availability of a newly-architected version of its Click Forensics traffic quality management platform that allows online ad networks, publishers and advertisers to identify traffic that’s more likely to convert into sales. Building on its market-leading click fraud detection solution, the Click Forensics platform gives customers a more effective way to target high-quality online traffic sources to improve campaign performance.

“Our new platform helps customers pinpoint and increase the flow of highly-convertible traffic in real-time, which ultimately improves the results of their online campaigns.” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. More...

Industry Click Fraud Rate Climbs to Highest Level Reaching 17.1% in Q4 2008

AUSTIN, Texas – January 28, 2009 – Click Forensics, Inc. today released industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures for the fourth quarter 2008 from the search advertising industry’s leading independent click fraud reporting service – the Click Fraud Index®.

Key findings from data reported for Q4 2008 include:
- The overall industry average click fraud rate grew to 17.1% for Q4 2008. That’s up from 16.0% in Q3 2008 and from the 16.6% rate reported for Q4 2007.
- The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.2%. That’s up from the 27.1% rate reported for Q3 2008 and down slightly from the 28.3% rate reported for Q4 2007.
- Traffic from botnets was responsible for 31.4% of all click fraud traffic in Q4 2008. That’s up from the 27.6% rate reported for Q3 2008 and the 22.0% rate reported for Q4 2007.
- In Q4 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside the U.S. came from Canada (7.4 percent), Germany (3.0 percent) and China (2.3 percent).
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IAB US Issues Click Measurement Guidelines for Public Comment

New York: The IAB announced the release of Click Measurement Guidelines, a document that will establish parameters for the accurate buying and selling of cost-per-click advertising, an important and growing category of interactive advertising. Marketers will now have a standard for consistently and reliably measuring their performance-based marketing efforts. The guidelines also provide a strong framework for filtering fraudulent clicks, giving buyers and sellers confidence that only legitimate clicks are being counted.

The Click Measurement Guidelines will:
- Provide a detailed definition of a “click” and outline standard methodologies by which clicks should be measured and counted, including the identification of invalid and/or fraudulent clicks.
- Define standard terms that will help streamline the buying and selling of click-based media.
- Increase transparency and consistency in click measurements for media companies, ad-serving organizations, advertisers, and third-party click auditors.

“These guidelines demonstrate our continued commitment to being the most accountable advertising medium and providing marketers with the highest possible level of transparency,” said Sherrill Mane, Senior Vice President, Industry Services of the IAB. “It is critical that the advertising industry agree upon the precise definition and measurement of a click and establish procedures for weeding out fraudulent clicks. The IAB is proud to have organized our members around this effort.” More...

Keeping Ourselves Honest: Auditing Our Predictions For 2008

Matt Greitzer writes for Mediapost: Each February we at Razorfish release our "Digital Outlook Report," outlining the key trends and predictions in digital marketing over the next year. In this column I will revisit the four major search marketing trends we predicted in 2008, and see how successfully we predicted the future.

Trend 4: Advertisers will shift their focus away from last-click attribution toward multi-click and custom attribution models. This happened, even more than we anticipated. More...

comScore: Why is Google's Market Share in Hitwise Data So Much Higher than in comScore's?

comScore's Andrew Lipsman writes: comScore and Nielsen are within about half a percentage point of each other, while Hitwise shows Google at a substantially higher 72%. Now, why is it that Hitwise consistently shows a search share about 8 percentage points higher than comScore and Nielsen? A behavior as ubiquitous as Internet search yields extremely robust sample sizes, which means that there should be little variation between the services if each was sufficiently representative of the U.S. Internet audience. More...

Google Analytics Unveils Enterprise Class Feature Set, Updated Interface, and Integration with Google AdSense

Google Analytics™ web service announced new enterprise-class features including custom reports, advanced segmentation, an API, as well as an updated interface, richer data visualizations, and an integration with Google AdSense™. These new features combine the sophistication and versatility of a full-service web analytics tool with Google Analytics' ease of use and accessibility, so that businesses large and small, around the world, can even better serve their visitors. More...

Why Integration Is Not the Grail

Chris Copeland writes for MediaPost: Let's start with the common viewpoints on what is integration and what role does search play in the causal relationship of media. I think most see the two as inextricably linked. Search is the effect to the cause created in other media. TV advertising runs, display advertising shows and THEN people search. Engagement mapping and attribution of credit exist to ensure no one vehicle gets the credit. Search is discredited because it's the bottom of the funnel and is able to be tracked -- suddenly two bad things when the objective is to measure the less measurable. Thus, other media creates a cause and search delivers the effect of fulfilling interest. And here comes integration. More...

In US, Google Receives 71 Percent of U.S. Searches in August 2008

Hitwise writes: Google accounted for 71.01 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending August 28, 2008, Hitwise announced today. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 18.26, 5.32 and 3.45 percent respectively. The remaining 46 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.95 percent of U.S. searches. More...