Yahoo! Taps Executive to Oversee Click Quality
In an effort to provide more visibility into its click-fraud detection efforts, Yahoo! yesterday named corporate lawyer Reggie Davis to the newly-created post of vice president of marketplace quality.
Davis will hire and lead a team that will respond to advertiser concerns over bogus clicks on pay-per-click ads on Yahoo!’s search results pages and within its network of Web content sites. Other areas relating to online ad quality, such as traffic quality and network placement, will also be part of Davis’ responsibilities.
“Yahoo! has a lot of folks focused on this stuff: the CTP [Clickthrough Protection] group, the Marketplace Integrity group that does partner reviews and evaluations, and other sections within our company,” Davis said yesterday. “What’s exciting about this job is the task of providing operational focus, pulling all those existing teams together to make sure we’re going in the right direction while continuing to build out the group. There’s a real executive level of commitment to this role, and a lot of resources being put in play.”
Davis also said that on average somewhere between 12% and 15% of total clicks on Yahoo’s search and content networks are discarded as invalid, with no charges made against advertisers’ pay-per-click accounts. In actual practice, he added, those discard rates may vary widely according to business category, since some industries hold greater appeal for click fraudsters than others.
In his new capacity, Davis will help guide development of tools designed to make Yahoo online ads more attractive to advertisers. These will reportedly include the introduction later this year of a tiered pricing system based on click quality and a domain blocking function that will let marketers bar clicks from suspect Web sites.
Davis said the company is also working on plans to institute an advisory council of advertisers and publishers who will offer feedback on issues and enhancements in Yahoo’s performance ad programs.
A seven-year veteran with Yahoo!, Davis served most recently as associate general counsel managing the company’s litigation, including its defense in click-fraud lawsuits such as the one brought by Checkmate Strategic Group. That suit was settled in July 2006 when Yahoo! promised to investigate advertisers’ fraud claims dating back to January 2004. The creation of Davis’ new post and the establishment of the outside advisory panel were also part of that settlement.
Yahoo’s efforts to shed light on invalid clicks may have begun in that settlement, but they’ve taken on added importance since the launch of the company’s new Panama ad platform. Early reports from some marketing agencies indicate that the new system is producing fewer clickthroughs but more conversions for advertisers, suggesting that Yahoo! is doing a better job of targeting ads in its search results than before the transition.
