The click fraud reports from two major institutes are out, and it doesn’t look good. You’d think Google and the other major Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisers would be getting better about controlling click fraud, but apparently not. The graph to the right shows results from ClickForensics, which has tracked a stead rate of growth concerning click fraud since 2006.
Anchor Intelligence, however, shows a decrease – but their stats on click fraud are considerably higher, as shown by the charts below.:
Innocuous /invalid rates are said to be down significantly, but while ClickForensics puts click fraud at only around 18%, Anchor pegs it at over 28%. According to the Anchor report:
The innocuous invalid rate decreased drastically from 7.0% in Q1 to 0.9% in Q2, representing a 87.4% decrease. Meanwhile, the attempted click fraud rate remained nearly unchanged, as it decreased from 29.2% in Q1 to 28.9% in Q2.
In contrast, ClickForensics stated:
• The overall industry average click fraud rate was 18.6 percent. That’s up from the 17.4 percent reported for Q1 2010 and the 12.7 percent rate reported for Q2 2009.
• In Q2 2010, the countries outside North America with significant CPC traffic producing the greatest volume of click fraud were Singapore, Pakistan, Japan, Ukraine and China respectively.
“Over the past several quarters, we’ve seen the overall click fraud rate slowly trending higher,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The main reasons appear to be the continued sophistication of botnets and malware prevalent in the fast-growing search marketing space. We advise online marketers to be watchful of their campaigns as they spend more on search advertising in the coming quarters.”
ClickForensic’s own ‘high threat heat map’ also differs drastically from Anchor’s:
Tags: click fraud, Google, PPC