* An auditing service for pay-per-click advertising
Pay-per-click is a tempting proposition for companies that want to get the best bang for their advertising buck because they assume they are paying for results. The problem with this advertising model is that a competitor or anyone else who feels the needs to mess with a PPC client can just sit there clicking on the PPC link and racking up hundreds or thousands of dollars in bogus charges for the advertiser.
A new service, WhosClickingWho? (WCW) was designed to address exactly this problem (see editorial links below).
WhosClickingWho? is an auditing service that relies on their clients adding a short piece of JavaScript to their PPC pages along with a tracking tag to each PPC URL.
The code does three things: It places a cookie on each browser that clicks on a PPC link and keeps a count of how many times that browser clicks on the PPC link. Should the browser user click on the PPC link more than a pre-set number of times, a feature called ClickMinder displays a configurable warning to the browser user.
The click is recorded by WCW along with the browser’s IP address; a Unique Identifier String stored in a cookie to identify individual browsers (if the cookie is rejected, a user session ID is used instead); the organization that are associated with the IP address, if available; the user agent offered by the browser; the transaction date and time; the originating Pay-per-click Search Engine and if applicable, the originating partner site; and any keywords used.
WCW works with a large number of PPC search engines including Overture, FindWhat, Sprinks, 7Search, Ah-ha, Epilot, GoClick, Looksmart, Google and Adwords. This is important because should some miscreant use multiple PPC engines to fraudulently create charged-for clicks, WCW will correlate those clicks to identify that they all originate from the same browser.
This kind of audit trail can be used as proof to the PPC engines to reconcile charges. The WCW Auditor produces extensive reports and analyses that are also useful tools for understanding the value of PPC service.
Pricing is by the target PPC domain and starts at $79 for a one-month subscription, which includes free installation support and allows for 50,000 transactions per month. Additional URLs are priced at $47 per month. Six month and yearly plans are also available.
