The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has released its Click Measurement Guidelines, the parameters with which publishers and advertisers can uniformly sell and buy cost-per-click advertising.

In addition to helping identify and discard fraudulent clicks, the Guidelines:

• Define the life-cycle of a "click," and the standard by which clicks should be measured and counted.
• Provide agnostic terms to streamline the buying and selling of click-based media.
• Contribute to greater consistency — and thus transparency — among media firms, ad networks, advertisers and third-party click auditors.

"That we’ve obtained agreement within the online industry on the precise definition and measurement of a click and a procedure for identifying and eliminating fraudulent clicks is a huge win for the industry," asserted Research Director Joe Laszlo.

The Click Measurement Working Group, which went over and approved the Guidelines, includes reps from 38 IAB member companies, which can include sellers, measurers and auditors of online media. The Working Group has been working in tandem with the Media Rating Council to prepare a universally agreeable set of Guidelines since late 2005.

At present, the IAB is currently working on building a quantitative ROI model for social media. Intent on changing existing interactive ad standards, the institution also began a dialogue with agency creatives.