Firetop

This afternoon I had an online demonstration of Nielsen’s AdRelevance tool, an online reporting interface which enables the subscriber to see which advertisers are running banners across the major media websites. AdRelevance reports show where banners are running, flight durations and stores examples of the creative. From an online ad sales perspective this is wonderful stuff. Auto-triggered email alerts can dispatch emails displaying the latest campaign details from competing websites, enabling a sales person to contact the relevant marketing manager about running a similar campaign on their own network. However, one thing was pretty clear - AdRelevance is generating false clicks on banners when it retrieves creative and URL information, not good news for advertisers.

The AdRelevance keyword analyser is also obtaining URL information at a cost to the advertiser per click from the likes of Google or Yahoo for its keyword reports. All this was confirmed by the Nielsen account manager who was demonstrating the tool for me via webex ”Yes somebody else pointed that out recently” she said. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised about this ‘click fraud’, how else would such a tool operate but by automating the actions of a human?

What if you wanted to block the AdRelevance spider from crawling you own website, generating false traffic and click data? I cannot find any record of a relevant IP or robot identifer online, perhaps if somebody can dig one out they might let me know.

Technorati Tags: adrelevance, click fraud, nielsen netratings, robots, spiders

Bookmark to: