Yahoo! Inc. has appointed Reggie Davis to Vice President of Marketplace Quality, where Davis will serve as the company’s first senior executive dedicated to continually enhancing the quality of Yahoo!’s display and search listings marketplaces.
As click fraud debates continue to get more and more heated, it is good move by Yahoo to assign Davis this new role where he will serve as much as an internal watchdog as he will a talking head and public figure representing Yahoo Search Marketing and its quality standards, especially in times of controversy.
One of Davis’s first duties was addressing the amount of fraudulent clicks that Yahoo tracks and filters.
Greg Sterling adds :
Yahoo disclosed that there was an average of between 12% and 15% clicks that were filtered or not charged to search marketers. Davis was careful to explain that this was not a click fraud number, which was a smaller figure.
Davis said his appointment to a VP level position was part of a larger organizational initiative and commitment to bring more transparency to the issue of click quality and be much more open and proactive with search marketers to address their concerns and generally enhance customer relations. As a long-term approach to the marketplace Yahoo recognizes this is much better than managing litigation after the fact.
From the Press Release :
Davis is responsible for developing and executing a strategy aimed at driving more rapid innovation, greater transparency and faster delivery of product and service enhancements to build an even higher quality advertising network for Yahoo!’s customers.
Davis will hire a dedicated staff to manage across all of Yahoo!’s cross-functional quality teams and ensure that customer input is integrated into all efforts to address click fraud, traffic quality, network placement and other marketplace quality issues. Davis and his team will also be responsible for increasing Yahoo!’s dialogue with advertisers and publishers on quality related matters.
In addition to developing Yahoo’s longer-term marketplace quality strategy, Davis has already begun working closely with the Yahoo! product teams to drive several enhancements aimed at providing greater visibility and control to Yahoo!’s search advertisers this year, including: quality-based pricing, which is designed to ensure that traffic is priced in a manner that is consistent with the quality it delivers to advertisers; domain-level blocking, which allows advertisers to identify individual domains from which they do not wish to receive traffic; automated advertiser inquiry submission processes and greater detail around advertiser and publisher adjustments.
