eBiz News: Click Fraud Rate Continues to Climb

The click fraud rate climbed to 16.6 percent for the fourth quarter of 2007, with the average yearly click fraud rate going up 15 percent over 2006, according to a recent report from Click Forensics.

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

Now in its third 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 Q4 2007 include:

• The overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for Q4 2007. That's up from the 14.2 percent click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 16.2 percent for Q3 2007.

• The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.3 percent in Q4 2007. That's up from the 19.2 percent average click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 28.1 percent for Q3 2007.

• The 2007 industry average click fraud rate grew by 15 percent over the industry average click fraud rate for 2006.

• Q4 2007 click fraud traffic from botnets was 15 percent higher than click fraud traffic from botnets in Q3 2007.

• In Q4 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from India (4.3 percent) Germany (3.9 percent) and South Korea (3.7 percent).

"In 2007 we saw a significant jump in the industry average click fraud rate when compared with the average rate for 2006," Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics, said in a statement. "Fraudsters are using more sophisticated means to perpetrate click fraud, including infiltrating mom-and-pop e-commerce sites. As a result it's more important than ever before for advertisers, publishers, ad networks and search engines to cooperate and share data in order to stem what's on target to be an even worse problem in 2008."

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

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