Frequently Asked Questions

A: Traffic Quality Management (TQM) is the process of scoring visits to identify and mitigate sources of low quality. TQM can be broken into two groups: Outgoing Traffic Quality Management (for publishers and ad networks) and Incoming Traffic Quality Management (for advertisers). Outgoing Traffic Quality Management allows publishers and ad networks to decide which ads to show to certain visitors. The result is more relevant ad targeting, higher earnings-per-click (EPC), and fewer chargebacks. From an advertiser's perspective, incoming TQM is the identification and elimination of sources of low-quality ad traffic, thereby increasing both ad spending efficiency (more money to spend on higher converting terms) and visitor relevancy.

A: You need to protect your online marketing investment. In the same way as Nielsen independently tracks television advertising, we track online media and give you tools to stop click fraud before it occurs. Advertisers and agencies typically spend 2 to 3% of the media spend placed on television with Nielsen.

A: Yes. Additionally, Google, Yahoo, and MSN provide their own page tag tracking, which seamlessly integrates with our tools to provide the best web analytics arsenal available for tracing invalid clicks.

A: Google does filter out bad clicks. As we look at client data, we see that they are filtering only 2 to 3% of all clicks you pay for.

A: Online advertising is a huge business, and growing fast. Ironically, with millions of internet users viewing billions of ads every day, it's getting harder and harderfor advertisers and consumers to connect. Potential customers can get lost in a sea of clicks. Unfortunately, this volume also creates an environment in which fraudsters can be hard to find. Traffic Quality Management exposes these fraudsters, eliminates irrelevant visitors, and helps direct high-quality potential visitors to advertisers.

A: We accept either page tags or web server log files. Our client services organization can help you make any changes to your account required to generate the data we need to process your PPC traffic.

A: Advertisers who don't manage traffic quality risk paying for sources of low and no quality traffic buried within their campaigns. And, they may be susceptible to click fraud. In the increasingly competitive and costly marketplace of pay-per-click advertising, anyone who works to improve the relevancy of their visitors will have a significant advantage. TQM means ensuring an advertiser only pays for relevant visitors by culling out the clicks that they never should pay for in the first place.

A: No. One of the greatest weaknesses of any web analytics solution is that they assume all incoming traffic is of the same quality. Web analytics only look at the behavior of a visitor on the site. TQM takes a multi-dimensional view of the visitor by looking at the behavioral, economic, technical, and community aspects of every visit. For example, by web analytics standards, two separate visitors would be recognized as having the same level of quality. However, if one of those visitors came from a country where the advertiser doesn't do business, TQM would recommend and show you how to mitigate those visitors. Click Forensics works with many large firms who already have web analytics solutions in place.

A: Not necessarily. The reports provided by search ad partners often hide important sources of low quality traffic. Many search ad partners don't provide any performance reports at all. Advertisers need the right information, presented in an easy to use format to effectively cull out low/no quality traffic. Since search partners often don’t provide this insight, ads can be shown to the wrong searchers. This results in lost opportunity and increased costs.

A: By making adjustments to keywords and spend, advertisers can begin to mitigate low-quality traffic. Many ad providers offer additional tools, such as site and country exclusion, which allow well-informed advertisers to further improve online traffic quality. Advertisers should work with their ad provider partners to see what options are available to them.

A: Yes. Ad providers have offered refunds to advertisers in the past. However, these refunds are often small courtesy credits less than 1% of ad spend. In our experience, the savings from proactive mitigation far outweighs any credit offered by an ad provider.

A: Innovative ad providers are working directly with third party auditing sites to identify sources of low-quality traffic and help advertisers ensure they get what they paid for. Other ad providers are hiding deeper in their "black box" to avoid any costly potential lawsuits.

A: Yes. Several first-tier SEM agencies are part of our Agency Partner Program (for a full list, click here). Unfortunately, many agencies only look at a small piece of overall traffic quality. To request your agency be added to our Agency Partner Program, please click here.

A: Because it's important to advertisers. Advertisers are becoming more and more concerned about sources of low-quality traffic. They're eliminating sources of wasted ad spend and cutting back spending. Ad providers, in response, are kicking out publishers and ad networks which provide low-quality traffic. Additionally, many ad providers use a form of quality-based pricing. Improved traffic quality means a higher earnings-per-click (EPC) for publishers and ad networks.

A: There are several forms of low-quality traffic. One of the most prominent is click fraud. Fraudulent clicks can occur when publishers knowingly or unknowingly use bots or click farms to inflate the number of clicks the ads they're hosting receive. Other forms of low-quality traffic include unqualified clickers and visitors with no intent to convert.

A: Publishers and ad networks can assign a quality score to visitors. Don't show ads to visitors with a very low traffic quality score. Many publishers and ad networks show expensive ads to visitors with a high traffic quality score, and less expensive ads to visitors with lower scores. By serving ads in this way, publishers and ad networks can more effectively capitalize on the likelihood of a certain visitor to convert.

A: That's great. It means you're taking traffic quality seriously. However, more traffic pattern data leads to better traffic scoring. For this reason, it's important to compare and contrast traffic quality patterns in your dataset against a community of advertisers, ad networks and publishers provided by Click Forensics. In addition, ferreting out poor sources of traffic is a never-ending and rapidly evolving effort. Augmenting your internal efforts with the capabilities and insight provided by a recognized, independent 3rd party expert like Click Forensics ensures that your efforts will be at the leading edge of effective TQM.