Yahoo! have officially announced that they are teaming up with click-audit company Click Forensics to help combat click fraud.

News of this partnership was first rumored at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York two weeks ago; however it was officially confirmed in the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog on April 2.

What is Click Fraud?

Wikipedia defines click fraud as a type of internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link.

So just who is Click Forensics?

Before partnering with Yahoo!, Texas- based Click Forensics studied the PPC industry and gave a quarterly estimate of click fraud activity that generally found a range between 14% and 21% of clicks that could be considered “fraudulent”.

Just how will they work together?

Yahoo! are quoted as saying that “in this new partnership, Click Forensics can act as an intermediary for advertisers and work with us on specific advertiser issues when advertisers request help from both of us. Click Forensics generally provides a way to help advertisers understand their click data, and now can provide Yahoo! with more information on behalf of the advertiser if there is a question about traffic quality.”

This new partnership is certainly welcomed by all in the SEM industry as it is a big step in the right direction in ridding the online advertising environment of click fraud.

The questions now is what are other big paid advertising providers such as Google and Microsoft going to do to help in these efforts.

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