The Click Quality Council, an independent group of leading online advertisers, advertising
agencies and click quality monitoring firms which meet monthly to discuss industry
initiatives and share best practices related to the mitigation of click fraud.
The Click Quality Council recently published a list of eight principles it believes should
serve as the foundation for ensuring industry-wide click quality. The development of the
eight core principles for ensuring click quality is the result of a six month effort by Click
Quality Council members to identify the key elements needed to deliver adequate quality
in pay-per-click advertising campaigns.
The Eight Principles to Ensure Click Quality 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 geotargeted
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.