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The previous article finished by posing the question, "Why do some parking companies swallow the reporting of clicks but not the payment?" It doesn't really make sense.
 Here's my theory. If you swallow the reporting of the click then you can make the payment whatever you want. In fact, for a parking company it is often necessary to make the payment whatever you want. It's critical to understand that last sentence and it bears further explanation.
If you are a parking company and have all your domains mixed up in one big huge Google payout pool then how do you accurately payout a domainer a percentage of the revenue? Let's face it, some domainers will have some "not quite right" clicks and others will have traffic from countries that shouldn't be paid for and the list of exceptions goes on and on.
Although Google will pay for every click I personally believe that they pay for every click that makes it through their anti-fraud system. I must admit it that this is one system that I would love to sink my analytical teeth into.
Back to the parking companies. The parking companies have other challenges as well and the major one is the timeliness of their reporting systems. Google delays sending data to the parking companies for 24-48 hours and yet the parking companies are able to report on roughly an hourly basis. How is this done?
At the time of reporting, all the parking companies really know is gross traffic and clicks, everything else is in the hands of Google. In fact, Google may actually not pay certain clicks or count some of the traffic.
The job of the parking company is to then try and mimic Google and guess what they will pay for each domain. This will then mean that at the end of each month the stats may go a little crazy because guesses have been a little wrong and adjusted to ensure that the domainer is paid their correct percentage. Have you every noticed that at the end of each month this happening for some parking companies? I know that I have.
Also, if a parking company perfectly mimics the Google system for payments and clicks then it logically follows that it is likely to receive an uplift in revenue due to smart pricing. A small uplift in revenue across a large volume of traffic represents a significant windfall.
So what else is impacted by the swallowing clicks? The obvious answer is that with a reduced number of clicks and a static sum of money the average earnings per click for a static portfolio will artificially increase. This is one of the reasons why it's crazy to compare one parking company's stats against another for an individual domain.
So after this great long explanation of what's going on, where does this leave us in our definition of a click? Just for the record I personally believe that the parking companies are doing their best to report stats in the current framework that they've adopted. I also do not believe that any of the major parking companies are knowingly fraudulent by stealing any domainers hard earned revenue. I do think that there are times when a complex system adopted by a parking company may break and this needs to be continually addressed.
In the next article in the series I'll address what I think needs to be done to solve the problems associated with clicks.
Previous articles in the series:
Part 1 - Parking Company Standards
Part 2 - The journey to transparency
Part 3 - Traffic definitions and reporting
Part 4 - Current Traffic Reporting Problems
Part 5 - What's a click?
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