ClearMark More Information Overall Rating: Not Rated Pay Per Click Universe Recommends: AdWatcher - 100% Click Fraud Protection. Concerned about click fraud? Protect your online advertising dollars with the world's most trusted & accurate click fraud solution on the market today. AdWatcher will put a stop to competitors and fraudsters who are looking to drain your hard earned advertising budget. Test-Drive AdWatcher For FREE For 30 Days! ClearMark is a traffic quality solution offered by Anchor Intelligence, a firm based in Mountain View, California. The product is available to advertisers, search engines, and ad networks, but it appears their main target market consists largely of ad networks and search engines. The primary advantage to ClearMark distinguishing it from the vast number of other click fraud solutions available is its ability to use a real-time traffic scoring system, which greatly increases its efficiency insofar as managing traffic sources and maximizing ROI for advertisers. Having the capability to screen traffic in real-time for click and impression fraud, as well as other indicators of traffic quality, can provide a real advantage for smaller ad networks and second- or third-tier search engines to help them compete with larger networks and engines. For example, GenieKnows, a second-tier search engine that concentrates on vertical search, recently purchased the Anchor Intelligence product to monitor online traffic across their network after a one-month trial period during which they reported significant savings from the ability to identify fraudulent clicks on the fly. Each click is identified with a “reason” code as it occurs, making it easy to sort out good from bad clicks and to move forward in blocking the sources of fraud. Anchor Intelligence has just begun testing a new product that can rate websites within a publisher’s network, assessing them as having good, poor, or fraudulent traffic. By adding site characteristics and third party data to the mix, supplementing with daily updates on new traffic, ClearMark for Websites expands capabilities out from click fraud alone. If the tests go as planned, the Software as a Service (SaaS) app should be available in Spring of 2009. Even if you decide your PPC campaigns are likely too small to benefit from ClearMark itself, the company has developed an interesting whitepaper that anyone interested or involved in advertising online should read. Entitled “Anatomy of a Click Fraudster,” it identifies the four most common types of fraudulent behavior, put together after a year-long look at traffic patterns across its entire client base. The four include: click fraud farmers, pyramid schemers, money launderers, and kit sophisticates. It’s an informative look at the problem from a slightly different approach than usual in discussions of click fraud, and also includes suggestions that any advertiser can put into place to help alleviate the problem. The whitepaper can be downloaded here. Reporting is provided by ClearMark Reports, an online reporting environment. Traffic can be evaluated over time, with splitting into quality-based categories, and by country. Users can filter down to viewing a single traffic source or finding a specific site. Tables provide information on the highest and lowest-performing sites, IPs, countries, and a variety of other parameters. ClearMark’s “reason codes” identify the key contributing factors to the quality scores presented. Although mainly a tool for ad networks and smaller search engines, ClearMark is also worth investigating if you run large PPC ad campaigns. The ability to see activity on a real-time basis sets this tool apart from all the others that monitor and measure click fraud on websites. And even if you find that the scope of ClearMark is outside of your current needs, take a few minutes to download and read their “Anatomy of a Click Fraudster” whitepaper – it has a lot of good information and will get you thinking about how serious a problem click fraud can be to any level of advertiser. |
