The downturn in the economy is apparently leading more than the usual number of ambitious click-fraudsters to try their luck. And that’s causing ad networks to think a lot more about click fraud and the overall health of their networks, says Anchor Intelligence CEO Ken Miller. We first wrote about the company in late 2007 when they unveiled their click fraud product.
The company has always been secretive about their partners – they work with both advertising networks and advertisers/agencies and are able to compare traffic across those networks to increase data relevancy, and most of the time these partners don’t want others to know about their specific security precautions. But Technorati, LookSmart, Adbrite, Vivaki (Publicis Groupe) are all announced, and today Ask is also announcing that they’ve started working with Anchor Intelligence.
The product has also evolved since 2007. They aren’t just looking for fraud/no fraud on clicks any more. In addition to tracking fraud, the company is also generally scoring the overall attractiveness of a given click. Traffic with a very high likelihood of conversion can be sent to one type of advertising (CPA-type stuff), and lower quality stuff can be sent to ads that pay per click. The fraudsters can look at display ads all day.
The company says they are also working on a “self serve” product that publishers can use on their own to gauge the advertising quality of their traffic. I’m looking forward to using this for TechCrunch when it launches.
The company says that by next calendar quarter they’ll be scoring over a billion clicks a month, so there are clearly some other large partners working with the company that haven’t been announced. They’ve raised $6 million in venture capital to date.
typo?
“Traffic with a very high likelihood of conversion can be sent to one type of advertising (CPA-type stuff), and lower quality stuff can be sent to ads that pay per click. The fraudsters can look at display ads all day.”
Does Google already do this? If not, its a pretty smart strategy and could drastically improve internet advertising quality across the board if it became common practice.
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I am very disappointed with PPC traffic from Ask Sponsored Listings. When I recently tested it out, it looked like all the clicks from their partner network websites were coming from spyware or something very low quality. Hopefully this new partnership improves the advertiser experience.
I love the English language. I read the title of this article as an imperative sentence.
“Ask partners [who have] anchor intelligence to stop fraudsters and optimzie ad serving!”
Actually, Ask has been working with Anchor for quite some time, so if you think the traffic is bad, it probably means their stuff doesn’t work too well!
Re: showing display ads to the fraudsters, doesn’t that just shift the fraud from the PPC buyer to the CPM buyer? Why shoudl I pay to show my ads to fraudsters?!
Would be interesting to hear the underlying criteria under their scoring of the quality of traffic. Sounds really promising.
Nice that they are partnering with someone to try and make improvements to ask.com, now they just need to stop deceptively advertising using arbitrage in Google and maybe we could all be friends.
I am very disappointed with PPC traffic from Ask Sponsored Listings!!!