August 09, 2006 | Wednesday

SES San Jose 06 - Day two highlights

By Admin in News |Search Engines |Ask |Google |Yahoo |Search Expertise |Click Fraud

One of the most volatile sessions of the last two days at SES has been the Auditing Paid Listings session. You could say is was a click fraud cat fight!

The session was hosted and moderated (and it needed it) by Jeff Rohrs; who explained that the session would be more of an informal chat than a presentation. How wrong could he be!

Reprentatives from the search engine included John Slade from Yahoo, Shuman Ghosemanjumder from Google, and Paul Valez from Ask; whilst other interested parties included Jessie Stricchiola from Alchemist Media, Lori Weiman from KeywordMax and Tom Cuthbert from Click Forensics.

Yahoo taled impressively and passionatly on the subject and stressed that they were keen to help large SEM’s identify fraud quicker; whereas Google decided to take the opportunity to blast 3rd party auditing systems and produced a report on the day saying that “basic sanity checks” have not occurred within 3rd party systems. Not entirely tactful when the chap is sitting next to you!

Read more about Google attitude to click fraud and third party tools here.

One thing that came out of the session loud and clear was that it is essential to have an experienced staff in fraud detection on your campaign. This is something that Latitude have been doing for some time; We are the only search engine marketing company in the UK with a full-time Loss Prevention Officer, whose sole responsibility is to monitor our clients’ campaigns for click fraud.

The results? Several thousands of pounds per month in click fraud refunds collected by Latitude on behalf of our clients. Those refunds go straight back into their campaigns; resulting in a superior ROI.