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Late last year I began a series on transparency, mapping out a direction for how to achieve a level of transparency that has so far been out of the reach of domainers. The first step in this journey is the forming of a series of standards that the various parking companies and advertising aggregators such as Google and Yahoo can be measured against.
 The first proposed standard was traffic and exactly what is a unique and how can we be sure that we have a unique visitor to a parked page. This was discussed in a previous article. This article will tackle the challenges associated with a definition of a click.
On the surface a click should be quite obvious. Either a user has clicked or they haven't and both of these events are technically very easy to measure. The challenge comes when you tie a click to a payment.
As soon as a payment is associated with a click then the lure of the potential rewards associated with clicking on your own advertisements becomes irresistible to some people. In fact, why click on your own advertisement when you can write a program to do it for you? This fraudulent behavior is one of the many reasons why we now have so many definitions of a click.
One of the most common methods of trying to address the fraud problem is by limiting the number of clicks that can be received from a unique IP address for a period of time.
For example, this could mean that when a domain receives two clicks from a single IP address within thirty minutes of each other then only one click is counted. In the case of some parking companies they only count a single click per 18-24 hour period!
In a question and answer times at TRAFFIC in 2006 I publicly asked the representative from Google, "Do you pay for EVERY click?" He answered unequivocally, "Yes".
I then proposed the scenario of a user going to a parked page, click on an advertisement and then clicking the back button in their browser and clicking on another advertisement. I asked, "How many clicks does the owner of the domain get paid for?" The representative from Google answered, "Two clicks". I then thanked him and began thinking in earnest about that second click. Where did it go and why did it go?
Have you ever noticed that it's impossible to get over 100% click through rate with most parking companies? This is because it's likely that the second click is swallowed by the anti-fraud systems. If the click is swallowed then is the payment for the click swallowed as well? There really was only one way to find out.
I posed the same questions that I asked the Google representative to a parking company using the Google advertising feed. They answered that the click is not counted but the payment for both clicks are added together and reported for the domain.
In the interests of good blogging I had to test this answer. I had a friend go to a domain (with a "clean IP address"), click an advertising link, the back button and then on another advertisement. (It is important to note that under my agreement with the parking company that I'm allowed to test pages out for a number of clicks per month.)The system reported one click and the minimum earnings per click payable, not twice the minimum. This is a problem.
In my next article I'd like to explore why I think that many parking companies swallow the second click and it's not because they are necessarily stealing from you. Let's face it, any parking company that actively stole from domainers would be exposed as soon as an employee left. I also believe that sometimes stuff just happens and this needs to be addressed.
Previous articles in the series:
Part 1 - Parking Company Standards
Part 2 - The journey to transparency
Part 3 - Traffic definitions and reporting
Part 4 - Current Traffic Reporting Problems
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