All PPC (pay per click) ad providers are keen to combat click fraud and have sophisticated methods for doing so although it still represents a significant proportion of their income since it is the advertiser who will always end up paying.
However, on Thursday (13th December 2013) Google announced that it was introducing a new system to deal with how ads are viewed and consequently charged for. “If you are an advertiser and a human being didn’t see your ad, then frankly nothing else matters,” said Neal Mohan, Google’s vice-president of display advertising products at Google. “If you are a marketer, why pay if a human being did not see the ad?”
The global on-line advertising industry is worth $117bn and it is estimated that as many as half of the digital ads that marketers buy are not seen at all, with a large portion only being viewed if a website user scrolls all the way down to the bottom of a web page. This issue of how effective advertising is has always been an issue for all forms of advertising be it TV of Bill Posters.
Now Google intends to introduce an approach called Active View. Google's new Active View offering is based on an emerging industry standard called IAB/3MS, which states that an ad is only “viewable” if more than 50 per cent of it is visible on the screen for one second or longer. Advertisers will be able to see a report of how many viewable impressions they have received for any given campaign, and this data can be used to inform future campaigns. The Active View system ensures that if your ad is buried "below the fold" and doesn't get seen then you will not be billed and if your on-line ad has been seen for at least one second then you will be billed for that impression.
I have always been rather sceptical about the value of such viewed ads which do not have any "call to action" and certainly attempts to at least bill for a viewing by a human being is a step in the right direction, but it really doesn't make for very effective use of ones advertising dollar, pound or euro. Billing for ads that didn't get seen in the past was always a very dodgy practice and this approach should have been introduced a long time ago. Whilst this may not be click fraud, I do think it continues to call into question the billions spent on adverts which are just about brand awareness on-line and fail to trigger a genuine sales lead. Maybe advertisers and agencies placing the ads need to think rather more carefully about what they are attempting to achieve with their on-line campaigns.
This is a good start, but Google and the other major on-line players need to go much further to clean up this industry and ensure advertisers get the value for money they pay for.
Further reporting:-
Financial Times , The Daily Telegraph , BBC
