New Way for Small Business to Gauge Ad Click Quality

With small businesses moving in droves to pay-per-click (PPC) online ads, the ability to gauge click quality just got a welcome shot in the arm. After years of planning and wrangling over standards, the Media Rating Council (MRC) — an online ad industry group — has awarded the first-ever click quality certifications to four leading sites, including Microsoft, Business.com (which publishes What Works for Business) and two others not yet publicly named.

In short, this provides — for the first time ever — an objective, audited means of assuring that the clicks you pay for are generated by real people with a real interest in the product or service you are advertising. MRC puts sites that apply for accreditation through a rigorous “stress test” to ensure that click quality meets strict industry standards. Sites with sub-standard traffic and shoot-from-the-hip measuring methods won’t pass the test — and there aren’t any government bailouts available.

Much like parents seek out accredited schools for their kids, online advertisers now have an objective yardstick by which to compare websites seeking their PPC dollars.

Targeting your PPC ads to the highest quality traffic you can find is still a challenge with so many sites available. But the new certification is a helpful indicator of value and effectiveness that offers some peace of mind. Certification by MRC means, among other things, that the site is committed to transparency about exactly where clicks come from, and uses accepted methods for measuring them.

For more detail, you can check out the MRC standards, as well as the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Click Measure Guidelines.

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