I’ve always believed that click fraud was a bigger PR problem than actual problem for the search engines. Of course there have been raging debates about the percentage of “invalid clicks” that advertisers were receiving and what the click fraud numbers actually are. But the engines historically took the “black box” position that they were dealing with the problem and working diligently to address it. But they also tended to address it reactively via litigation rather than getting out “in front” of the issue – at least in public.
Last August, the IAB and search engines came together to jointly form a group to create click quality standards and address the issue of click fraud as an industry. And now Yahoo has smartly appointed Reggie Davis as “Vice President of Marketplace Quality.”
The rest of this post is at SEL.
____
Related: Terry Semel raises expectations of Panama for Q1. Previously, the Wall-Street expectations managing had been: no results until at least Q2 (earnings call transcript). But things appear to be going extremely well, prompting Semel’s remarks.
Previously I was informally told by one Yahoo! search marketing exec. that the Panama geotargeting feature (the first thing you have to specify in setting up a campaign) was proving extremely popular.
Screenwerk 