I read Andrew Goodman’s review of PPC Assurance this morning with great interest. That may appear to be an incredibly obvious comment, but my interest was two-fold. First, I enjoyed learning about how Andrew is using PPC Assurance, and the value his client(s) have derived from it.

Secondly, and most importantly, I was interested to see how our message on click quality is being understood. Essentially; not all “bad clicks” are click fraud, and not all bad clicks are really bad. How’s that for simple?

If a click doesn’t match your campaign parameters, then it’s traffic you did not want. Therefore, it’s bad. (kind of). But if you didn’t pay for it, do you care? Might as well have been an organic click in that case, right? So, where’s the issue with having visitors arrive at your web site from a paid campaign, when you didn’t have to pay for those visitors? With Google’s invalid clicks, this is what you’re getting. Unfortunately, people confuse these “acceptable” bad clicks with “click fraud”. It’s not.

Of course, there’s the other problem; knowing which clicks you paid for that didn’t match your campaign parameters. These are what we call “undesired.” Andrew did a great job on explaining both these “acceptable” and “undesired” clicks.

Knowing what is going on in your campaigns is paramount. “Know every Click” is a by-line for us.

When reporting for customers, we’ve observed that some PPC campaigns are more open to issues than others. The larger the network, the more potential trouble points will exist. Also, the narrower, and more focused a campaign is, the harder it is for the ad network to serve the ads out properly all the time, and the more clicks requiring refunds will exist. Knowing when the problems exist, and being able to easily resolve these issues is what PPC Assurance is all about.

However, just using a normal analytics package doesn’t help you understand which of these clicks you paid for, and which you didn’t. Standard web analytics services are great tools for reporting on user activity within a site, and improving paths through to conversion. That’s extremely valuable, but very different from “search analytics” which is what we do.

Click Fraud tracking is also very different from what we do at PPC Assurance. In click fraud, visitor behavior is being analyzed to ascertain if it is “normal.” We don’t do that. We perform the same type of function Nielsen serves to TV, and Arbitron to radio: Did your ads display in accordance with the terms and conditions of your contract? If it didn’t we provide you with the mechanism you need to resolve the issue with your provider.

Can you imagine contracting services from anyone without some way of testing whether or not terms were met for payment? Well, if you’re buying PPC ads right now, you are effectively blindly trusting that your service provider is executing on their contract word for word. It doesn’t matter how much trust exists between parties, verification is a business requirement.

Any established business has audit trails in accounting, and means of verifying a variety of business metrics. Click Fraud detection does not provide this service, it provides an evaluation of the quality of the traffic referred by an ad network.

As I wrote last week in my post about Click Fraud in Forbes as an advertiser you want to protect yourself from Click Fraud, but not all mistakes in campaign execution are “fraud.” As an advertiser, you need to be cognizant of the quality of the clicks which reach your site, and you need to know that the contract you’ve entered into with your ad network provider is being honored. If you wanted clicks from just the U.S., you only want to be billed for clicks from the U.S. Simple. But just because you sometimes don’t doesn’t mean it’s click fraud.

Andrew knows the difference. He’s demonstrated today that PPC Assurance provide everyone with a simple way of knowing every click, and monitoring campaigns so that when problems do arise (and they do), you’ll know immediately, will be able to respond quickly, and will be able to resolve the problem without jumping through a lot of hoops.