Are You Experiencing Click Fraud?
Does it seem like your online marketing campaigns aren’t hitting their goals? You may be the victim of click fraud. Click Forensics today released industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures for the second quarter 2009 from the search advertising industry’s leading independent click fraud reporting service – the Click Fraud Index. Now in its fourth year, the Click Fraud Index provides statistically significant industry PPC data collected from online advertising campaigns for both large and small advertisers across all leading search engines. Traffic across more than 300 ad networks is also reflected in the data. Key findings for Q2 2009 include:
- The overall industry average click fraud rate was 12.7 percent. That’s down from 13.8 percent for Q1 2009 and from the 16.2 percent rate reported for Q2 2008.
- Click fraud traffic from sophisticated sources and scripted programs rose again in Q2 2009. This included a rise in the incidents of publisher collusion fraud on ad networks.
“The increased diligence of online ad networks to detect and block invalid traffic sources has contributed to the decline in the overall click fraud rate this quarter,” said Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics. “However, increasingly sophisticated attacks, such as publisher collusion fraud, continue to be a concern. Ad networks should pay close attention to such threats in the coming months.”
The data in Q2 also showed that many of the new click fraud schemes identified last quarter continue to increase in number and sophistication. Publisher collusion fraud was one example. This scheme occurs when online publishers use rotating IP-addresses or botnets to click ads on their own sites in order to generate inflated commissions from unprotected ad networks. Ad networks have difficultly differentiating such attacks from valid clicks.



