Technology’s Accurate Geolocation Information Improves Pay-Per-Click Advertising, Ensures Quality Traffic
ATLANTA – (November 3, 2008) – Click fraud continues to be a barrier to quality traffic delivery for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Digital Element, the leading provider of IP Intelligence solutions, reports that the company’s NetAcuity® technology is effective in not only reducing click fraud, but it also improves online advertising traffic and optimizes paid search campaigns.
Click Forensics, the industry leader in scoring, auditing and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community, realizes the value of knowing the geographic location of site visitors. A customer of Digital Element’s, Click Forensics reported 16 percent of clicks on online ads were fraudulent in the third quarter of this year, only slightly down from 16.2 percent a year ago. However, click fraud coming from botnets, networks of computers that hackers use in automated fraud attacks, increased significantly, experiencing a 10 percent rise and accounting for more than 27 percent of illegitimate clicks.
“Because today’s online advertisers face a number of issues — from delivering relevant messages to providing an exceptional online experience — IP Intelligence has evolved to address different challenges within that channel, including click fraud,” said Rob Friedman, executive vice president, Digital Element. “Unfortunately, the industry still struggles with the issue of click fraud. Digital Element’s IP Intelligence technology provides accurate and up-to-date geolocation information used to help in the fight against click fraud by uncovering patterns of fraudulent click activity, identifying botnets, and discovering the origin of invalid clicks.”
Click Forensics Leverages IP Intelligence
The Click Forensics Traffic Quality Engine is the brain behind each of its products. The engine analyzes PPC traffic data with sophisticated patent pending heuristics to score the relative merits of online traffic. Data mining techniques are applied to clicks to identify markers and determine the relative merit of every click, every visitor, and every site.
The company’s decision to implement Digital Element’s IP Intelligence is an example of the ways in which the technology can be leveraged to optimize every step in the online advertising process and to maximize return on investment for advertisers, publishers and ad networks.
To enhance its heuristics, Click Forensics needed accurate and up-to-date geolocation information on every site visitor, for every single customer. Digital Element’s NetAcuity IP Intelligence technology allows the company to perfect audience segmentation and targeting capabilities based on a comprehensive set of parameters that include global country, region, state, and city geolocation information. This information helps Click Forensics to ensure quality traffic in a number of ways such as identifying botnets and click fraud, which tend to originate from known geographies.
Another way that Click Forensics leverages Digital Element’s technology is to improve the algorithms that determine quality traffic.
According to Click Forensics Vice President of Marketing Steve O’Brien, “We can now score Internet ad traffic based on its likelihood of conversion, meaning that advertisers no longer have to pay for invalid traffic. This is huge in terms of providing value to our clients as they work to increase the value they receive from their online marketing expenditures.”
For more information on Digital Element’s IP Intelligence technology and its application within the online advertising industry, visit Booth #1211 at ad:tech New York.
About Digital Element
Founded in 1999, Digital Element is the industry pioneer of IP Intelligence, a non-invasive, privacy-sensitive technology that automatically uncovers geographic information, connection speed, domain name, ISP, language and other characteristics about online users based solely on their IP addresses. This knowledge enables online businesses to customize content for more accurate and profitable online interactions, making it ideal for targeted advertising, content localization, geographic rights management, local search and enhanced analytics. Digital Element’s patented IP Intelligence solution with its exceedingly accurate geolocation capabilities is used by industry-leading advertising networks, web publishers, search engines, social networks, e-tailers, and analytics platforms around the world to revolutionize the way people experience the Internet.
Digital Element is a business unit of Digital Envoy, part of Landmark Interactive, a Landmark Media Enterprises Company. For more information about Digital Element, visit www.digitalelement.net.
About Click Forensics, Inc.
Click Forensics is the leading provider of PPC traffic quality management and click fraud prevention solutions that help online advertisers and publishers stop click fraud and improve search marketing campaigns. The company also publishes the Click Fraud Index™, the top independent source of industry click fraud data. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available atwww.ClickForensics.com.