Not only is Yahoo helping content creators, they're helping their advertisers – which only makes sense, since these people help pay Yahoo's bills. One of the biggest concerns of anyone who advertises with a search engine is click fraud – people who click on search-related ads with no real interest and no intention to buy anything. Like other search engines, Yahoo maintains a system that identifies what it believes to be fraudulent clicks on ads and discounts them so advertisers aren't charged. In April, Yahoo took steps to make the system more transparent.
It launched something called the Click Filter Report. According to Yahoo's blog entry on the subject, “This report will help you understand how many clicks we are recording and how many of the ones we do record are deemed invalid. You can compare that information to the clicks you're seeing through your weblogs or third party products and, if something doesn't seem quite right, you can submit a click investigation request to our team.”
Keeping with the whole spirit of transparency, Yahoo finally gave us some good numbers about click fraud. The company said it discards between 12 and 15 percent of all clicks. Those are “typical” numbers, it notes, and the amount of click fraud committed can vary by industry, month, and product.
If you advertise with Yahoo, and you want to look over the click filter report for your site, it's not difficult to do. The blog post explains that it's in the same location as all other account reports. All you need to do is click on the “Reports” tab, and then select “Click Filter” under the “Traffic Quality Reports” section in the Reports Navigator on the left side of the screen. Judging from Yahoo's screen shot, a click filter report is fairly comprehensive. There are graphs and drop-down menus, and you can customize the report to a significant degree. It will show information for a range of timeframes, and can be set up to include details such as impressions, invalid clicks, invalid click rate, and average cost-per-click.
Yahoo is pretty emphatic about the flexibility of its click filter report: “You can choose to view this data across your entire account or by campaign, by distribution tactic, or by specifying certain campaigns by name via the search function. If you have multiple accounts, the report can display data from all of your accounts simultaneously.” The search engine notes that the click filter report is just one of a number of traffic quality measures it has undertaken recently, and seems committed to an ongoing effort in this area.
Responses have been mixed. Some think this new report and attitude of transparency will lure advertisers away from Google. Others think it's merely a gimmick on Yahoo's part to try to convince them that the search engine cares about click fraud. Assuming the information is accurate, however, it seems certain that users will find that it helps them measure the ROI of their search advertising campaigns.
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