Has pay-per-click put the digital advertising industry in jeopardy? Depending on how much of that traffic comes from things like botnets, it's a poor measure of success. Here's why.

A couple of years ago, I attended a conference at the Annenberg School at UPenn called The Hyperlinked Society. As a representative of the advertising business, I got to meet some of my internet heroes like David Weinberger and Seth Finkelstein, and participate in panel discussions with some of them. The ideas discussed at that conference spawned a book, as well as a terrific panel where I thought for a second that Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and The New York Times' Martin Nisenholtz might actually throw down.

But one of the other reasons why that conference stuck out in my mind is because it's the first time I can remember saying anything negative about Google.

On a panel discussion that dove deeply into the value of hyperlinks, I made the point that Google's PageRank, which ascribed value to links such that Page A's link to Page B was tallied as a vote on behalf of Page A for Page B, gave rise to some negative things as well as positive ones. While PageRank may have saved search as we knew it, Google's popularity also gave rise to things like link spamming, Black Hat SEO and content theft for the purposes of obtaining higher organic search results. 

I feel similarly about the whole concept of click fraud. Widespread concentration on the value inherent in an ad click has given rise to illegitimate businesses that fake ad clicks for profit. When I read things like this, I think that estimates might be inflated, but we could probably agree that click fraud is in the double-digit percentages when we look at the total activity behind a search campaign.

Just like most success metrics, ad clicks are just a surrogate for success -- and a poor one at that. Still, pay-per-click advertising in its various forms is a very popular channel for advertisers, and it will continue to garner ad dollars as long as advertisers see increased sales from the practice.

But I think click fraud will continue to chip away at legitimate activity for as long as we place value on that surrogate. It's far too easy for script kiddies to set up botnets, fake legitimate traffic and make money by gaming the system. At least it's easier than contributing real content or community and trying to attract advertisers that way.

Click fraud is just one consequence of the glorification of the ad click. There are many more. Mere hours after this column is published on iMediaConnection.com, it will be lifted, graphics and all, from that location and placed on at least half a dozen spam blogs whose purpose might be to enhance relevance to search results, or to send clicks to an unscrupulous marketer. Content theft is a definite consequence. There are plenty of others:

• Domain squatting for the purposes of capitalizing on type-in traffic, which deprives legitimate brand and trademark owners of their own brand terms, either temporarily or permanently.
  
  
• Violation of ad contracts, perpetuated by pay-per-click vendors who place advertisers out of network in an attempt to deliver to a contracted level of clicks. This cheapens brands, sours marketers on the pay-per-click advertising experience, and deprives legitimate sellers of ad revenue.
  
  
• Encouragement of the status quo with respect to advertiser success. Advertisers continue to use ad clicks as success surrogates and avoid healthy discussion of what really constitutes digital success. This encourages poor strategic thinking.

It's been over a decade since Procter & Gamble's interactive agency announced it would buy advertising solely on a pay-per-click basis. It has since moved on. Why haven't some of us?

The click is merely a measure of traffic. Depending on how much pay-per-click traffic comes from things like botnets, it's a poor representation of even that measure. It's a much bigger stretch to suggest that clicks equal success.

Imagine a digital advertising world where focus was taken away from the ad click and placed on other metrics like attitudinal shifts, offline sales lift or other measures that are closer to what advertisers actually want to measure. Not only would advertisers invest more heavily, but we'd also probably be free of a lot of the internet pollution we've had to contend with as the result of the popularity of the pay-per-click model.

Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.