14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is assuring customers using its adCenter platform that they are not charged for the clicks generated by MSNBot. Rajesh Srivastava, principal group program manager, Bing, responded to discussions pointing out that the Bing crawler clicks on the company’s own adCenter ads. The Redmond company is not denying that MSNBot is indeed generating clicks for links in adCenter ads, but points out that this is not a singular case, as all search engine bots do the same. Still, the company is not charging advertisers leveraging adCenter for the MSNBot clicks, or for the clicks from other search engine bots.
“The Bing team is aware of an issue shared by all search engines: paid advertising links on sites are, on occasion, crawled and indexed by search engines,” Srivastava noted. “Standard practice in the search industry is to scan web pages for the purpose of indexing and understanding the site’s content, and to determine which ads match best the destination site. Microsoft adCenter does not charge an advertiser for clicks generated by any known search engine bots, including our own.”
Bot-generated clicks are ignored by adCenter, Microsoft stated, revealing that the advertising platform turned to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Spiders and Robots protocol as one of the techniques employed to remove bots. The IAB is essentially a list of known bots, the Redmond company explained. And MSNBot, Bing’s crawler, is on the list.
“As a result, any activity generated by bots will not skew AdCenter data because it will be categorized as low quality in AdCenter Reports. You can view the Standard Quality and Low Quality data by accessing the AdCenter Reports tab,” Srivastava added. “This issue exists for all search engines, and we all follow the practice of not charging for bot-driven ad clicks. We maintain the integrity of our engine and our advertiser’s experience as a very high priority, and welcome your feedback.”