Click Fraud up another 15%

Click Forensics has released their latest report on Click Fraud. Click Fraud effects people and businesses who buy “pay per click” advertisements on web sites and search engines like google. It becomes fraud when:

• It’s not a human doing the clicking
• It’s human who is doing the clicking but his or her only intend is to cause the advertiser to be charged for the click, not because they are interested in the content advertised

The two most common sources of click fraud are competitors who want to see your budget eaten up without any legitimate customers going to your site. They also get the added benefit of being able to bid on those keyphrases for much less money once your budget is blown. This is by far the most common type of click fraud.

The other less common type of click fraud is perpetrated by the owners of networks of advertising supported web sites. These people get a share of what advertisers get paid when someone clicks an advertisement on their site. So they and their “crew” (or their software) make lots of clicks on the adverts on their sites.

Either way it happens it hurts the advertiser who is paying for the clicks.

While click fraud on average rose 15% this year and this is no surprise to those of in the business Click Forensics made some other notable points in their latest report:

• 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
• click fraud traffic from botnets was 15 percent higher than click fraud traffic from botnets in Q3 2007
• The overwhelming majority of click Fraud came from America, just like spam!