Ask Sponsored Listings recently launched a new platform which is managed by what they called Pureleads. Ask advertisers have been receiving emails about the change in the past week or so.
One savvy advertiser, Jerry Nordstrom, posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums, digging into the changes. The most significant change is that Ask will stop sending referrer data from clicks on their ads. That means, you really won't know where your clicks are coming from, when advertising on the Ask network.
The Pureleads FAQ explains:
Pureleads is our new proprietary technology that blends advanced click purification methods and automated campaign traffic management. The Pureleads system protects your campaign from unpredictable delivery spikes, automated click traffic and suspect traffic sources. The result is a powerful technology that improves campaign ROI, overall click to conversion metrics and reduces the time required to manage your campaign.
Just great, sounds wonderful, right? Read on...
With PureLeads, all clicks from our network are first sent to "aslads.ask.com" for evaluation (multiple traffic quality tests). As a result of our servers intercepting the clicks your web server logs now will register "aslads.ask.com" as the source of all ASL clicks.
So if a click comes from a different domain, it will appear as coming from ask.com. How great is that?
Jerry Nordstrom feels it has to do with Ask's inability to filter out click fraud. Jerry said:
We have not had the same ability to stop click fraud as Google and MSN and have been charging our advertisers for it for years. People were getting mad and could see the fraud from the sites in their referral reports. So now with Pureleads we're going to claim click fraud filtering and hide all referring traffic information from our advertisers.
Nice move Ask!
Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.
