MSN AdCenter Adds Quality Reports

Microsoft will make click quality reports available to advertisers on its adCenter pay-per-click platform, the company announced last week.

The initiative is Microsoft’s effort to assure advertisers about not only fraudulent clicks but under-converting clicks. According to a post on the official adCenter blog, The new reports separate out “invalid clicks”, a term the search engines commonly use instead of fraudulent clicks. Users will not be billed for these clicks and will be able to see what proportion of their search traffic these comprise.

In addition, Microsoft will classify as non-billable other low-quality clicks, including those that have “low or unclear commercial intent”, those showing “patterns of unusual activity”, or clicks originating from spiders, robots, questionable sources or test servers.

“Some traffic that adCenter has flagged as low quality might ultimately result in conversions for you, which is why the label ‘low quality’, rather than ‘invalid’, provides a more accurate description of this class of traffic,” Brendan Kitts, program manager for click quality for Microsoft adCenter, said in the post.

In the past few months, both Google and Yahoo! have added features to help advertisers get higher-quality clicks on their networks, including quality-based pricing and IP exclusion tools as well as performance reporting.

The adCenter post cited a number of third-party reports — several recent, but some dating back to late 2005 and early 2006–that underline the traffic quality on Microsoft’s pay-per-click network and particularly the conversion rates from those clicks.

“These studies don’t mean that advertisers will always see better results on Microsoft,” Kitts wrote. “However, these studies should be taken as evidence that Microsoft has a high-quality network and is working hard to maintain high standards of traffic quality.”