Thats awesome!

About time these companies offer a bit of credibility. The real test though will be if it works. Adcenter is known for having things not working when you most need it, hope they have there reporting issues resolved.

Well done MS! That's the first time AdCenter steps ahead of AdWords.

Mixed feelings.

"Clicks that have characteristics of low or unclear commercial intent"

Low intent? If they'd make their criteria public and clear webmasters could ensure it doesn't happen. Instead thats a blanket criteria capable of being assigned to any situation.
Absolute power...

This is my issue too. While it seems like a step in the right direction, unless we know that the definitions are it is just painting with a wide brush. When they say that a low quality click may result in a conversion but they won't bill me for that click the red flags go up. Let's see how this looks at the end of the month and the percentage of "low quality" clicks that are reported. My guess is that it will be less than 1%, far below actual.

Anything that starts to quantify the percentage of clicks that we are not charged for is a big step in the right direction I think. That's what they are really telling us here - not "low quality" but "not charged on, because they believe it is of low quality". Google's silence on reporting on this has simply fuelled the PPC fraid debate and I think this metric is an excellent move. Deciding which uncharged clicks are fraud and which are for other reasons is not so relevant to me as being only charged for real visitors.

If they'd make their criteria public and clear webmasters could ensure it doesn't happen

I think you may be looking at that from a publisher perspective. This is in the Adcenter interface, not any kind of ad partner interface. Microsoft's traffic is almost all its own at the moment.

wide brush

It will be interesting to see - for the first time - an engine reporting what percentage of its clicks they effectively send to the scrap heap. there have been some reports from Yahoo on the percentage of clicks they invalidate, but only across the whole network, not on a per site basis - so from that pov it's a whole lot less broad brush than anything else out there.

In addition - I don't see how you can easily graph or chart low quality by reason. With spam filters on emails, there is usually a series of factors that get measured that finally trigger an email as "spam", but graphing or tabling all the reasons? - what purpose would that serve? If a click is 1) a "double clicker" and 2) on a proxy IP number and 3) using an unidentifiable browser, which "box" would you put the click into? or would you start over reporting your unchargeable clicks?

I think it's a big step and time to see if the others follow suit. Microsoft makes big claims about their traffic quality compared to the others and they seem to be wanting to put clear daylight between themsleves and the others on this issue.

(I still want volume though!)

[edited by: Receptional at 10:36 am (utc) on July 9, 2007]