I’ve been meaning to post about the Pay for Click (PPC) Click Fraud components for a while, and the request for suggestions. The article in ZDNet really pushed me to start posing all of you a question (below) today. Basically, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, stated that despite all previous statements with regards to Google attempting to eliminate Click Fraud issues, he believes that it is not really a big problem, as the retailers factor in fraud to their costs.
As a former retailer, I’m keenly aware of how important a problem shoplifting and inventory shrinkage are. At the major sales periods: Christmas, Back to School, etc. I hired extra staff. I hired them to assist in the additional customer support, but also to deter shoplifting. Other stores didn’t; some lost their shirts (literally and figuratively). PPC Click Fraud is no different than shoplifting. Retailers go to all sorts of lengths to deal with the problem. But apparently, it’s not as serious a problem as it was for retailers when I was in the business. I cringe at the line “Let it happen!”;
“because, in a “perfect” economic sense, the money paid for the invalid clicks will be factored into advertisers’ ROI calculations as part of the cost of doing business with Google.” – Eric Schmidt.
Is Eric Schmidt really telling us that we have to raise the prices we charge to our clients because he considers Fraudlent PPC clicks to just be part of doing business? Or are his comments being taken out of context? If they are in context, what’s perfect about a business actually enabling fraud to occur?
I believe that Fraud is a felony. Aiding and abetting a felony is also a felony. Pretty good reason for Google to keep working on ways to eliminate Click Fraud, isn’t it?
Which brings me to some features that are coming to Enquisite.
On August 1, the Enquisite web site goes live, and we’ll add lots of BETA users, in a controlled manner. To ensure a dependable level of service, we decided that we would not allow thousands of new users to go live each day. But without a big PR machine, we also are reasonably sure we won’t have 1,000 / day to deal with. That said, we’re extremely excited! Lots of great people are already using the prototype system, and providing us feedback which we’re putting into the development queue. I look forward to many more people being part of the BETA release, and we very much look forward to more feedback, comments, suggestions, and criticisms. In fact, some of those suggestions were so important that we delayed the BETA release from July 1 to August 1. They were just things which we felt had to be in the tool on day 1.
About a week before August 1, many of those features will go live for our existing users.
Some features in the works, but not for Aug 1, relate to helping you discover PPC Click Fraud. I’m looking for your comments and feedback on what you would like to see in a click fraud detection tool. We’ll be releasing some PPC related reporting shortly (though most likely not for Aug 1), and want to let our users decide on key feature additions.
The Enquisite mandate is that these are your reports. We’re building some pieces we think you’ll want, but, please – tell us what you need. If you don’t want to leave a comment, you can just email me at zwicky at metamend.com.
Have a question and need quick answers? 
