Is Pay-Per-Percentage An Alternative to PPC & Click Fraud?
Shimon Sandler points to a Microsoft Research paper on the Pay-Per-Percentage advertising model and it being a viable alternative to Pay-Per-Click. Good timing on this find by Shimon as Google began inviting publishers for testing of Cost-Per-Action payments along with the launch of their Google Checkout system last month.
From Shimon’s post, Pay-Per-Percentage vs. PPC
Pay-Per-Percentage is immune to both click fraud and impression fraud. The challenge is that the ads must be shown in a truly random way, across the percentage of impressions purchased. The paper describes prefix-match: which is a system that is similar to broad-match, “but more compatible with pay-per-percentage”.
Speaking of Click Fraud, after sifting around on Shimon’s blog I also found an entry on Click Fraud on 2nd Tier Search Engines with a comparison of the Click Fraud technologies used in Enhance, Ask.com, Looksmart, MIVA & Kanoodle:
Ask – Ask discounts the CPC rates from traffic coming from their syndication partners. They have no official click fraud management process in place. The responsibility falls on the client to watch their web logs for any suspicious activity.
Looksmart – Has a 12 point system also, and a process to monitor the partner site’s trustworthiness on their distribution network. The Looksmart system looks for traffic spikes & patterns. Looksmart looks at the time and date of the query and click, the user’s IP address, the user’s browser, the query term, and the listing that received the click. Since Feb 2005, they have purged their search network of shady partners making it a much more reliable network.
Kanoodle – On their own site, they have a “click validation” Captcha to prevent bots (automated scripts) from committing click fraud. However, they have NO automated sytem or process for managing click fraud for clicks on their distribution network partner sites. If you notice any suspicious traffic patterns or spikes, then YOU need to tell your account rep. Then, they pass the information to a “traffic dept” and they investigate the matter further.
