Click Forensics recently released its click fraud data for the last quarter of 2008. Their data showed that the click fraud rate grew slightly year over the same period in 2007. Some of the Click Forensics findings include:
- Traffic from botnets was responsible for 31.4% of all click fraud during the quarter. This is a significant increase over 2007.
- The average rate of click fraud for PPC ads on search engine content networks was estimated at 28.2%. That means that over one quarter of PPC ad clicsas are fraudulent.
- The click fraud rate for the industry as a whole was 17.1% during the 4th quarter of 2008.
While the growth in click fraud over last year was not substantial, these number show how widespread click fraud still is. The good news is that the search engines are getting better and better at detecting click fraud, so hopefully advertisers won’t end up paying for many of these fraudulent clicks.
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I often wonder how they know when click fraud is occurring. Well, not the big stuff, such as businesses that are set up to click on those things, but in general, how would they know? Still, I’m not surprised; anything to make a buck in today’s economy, eh?
I’d be curious to know exactly how they catch click fraud as well. My understanding is that Google especially has gotten very good at it, but I’m not 100% sure. Obviously they can use IP addresses to catch some, but that is easy to get around with proxies.