Click Fraud Increases in Third-Quarter

Click Forensics Inc. recently released industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures for the third quarter 2007 from the search advertising industry's independent click fraud reporting service, the Click Fraud Index.

Now in its second year, the Click Fraud Index monitors and reports on data gathered from the Click Fraud Network, which more than 4,000 online advertisers and agencies have joined. The Click Fraud Network provides statistically significant industry PPC data collected from online advertising campaigns for both large and small companies across all the leading search engines. Key findings from data reported for Q3 2007 include:

• The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.2 percent for Q3 2007. This is an increase from 13.8 percent for the same quarter in 2006 and from 15.8 percent for Q2 2007.

• The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.1 percent in Q3 2007. That's up from 25.6 percent for Q2 2007, 21.9 percent for Q1 2007 and 19.2 percent for Q4 of 2006.

• Over 60 percent of traffic from parked domains and made for ad sites was click fraud.

• In Q3 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from France (4.2 percent) China (4.1 percent) and Germany (3.7 percent).

Of course, Google begs to differ when it comes to bogus numbers. If you want more information on the ongoing debate, the search giant's click-fraud czar, Shuman Ghosemajumder, regularly reports on his company's view at his blog.

Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.

Do you have a comment or question about this article or other e-commerce topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com E-Commerce Forum. Join the discussion today!