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Click Fraud Rate Hits 16.2 Percent

On October 18th, Click Forensics released pay-per-click fraud figures for the third quarter of 2007 from the search advertising industry’s leading independent click fraud reporting service – the Click Fraud Index[TM] which showed that click fraud was on the rise, increasing from 13.8% in the 3rd quarter of 2006 to 16.2% for Q3 2007.

For the large search engine content networks like Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher the news was even worse. The reported average click fraud rate continued to climb from 19.2% in Q4 of 2006, 21.9% in Q1 2007 and 25.6% in Q2 2007 to 28.1% in Q3 2007.

Other interesting facts revealed by the report were as follows:

- Over 60 percent of traffic from parked domains and made for ad sites was click fraud
- the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from France (4.2%), China (4.1%) and Germany (3.7%).

Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics, made the following comments:

“Click fraud activity continues to grow especially on made for ad sites, parked domains and on the content networks. Advertisers, publishers and search engines need to take notice because content networks are becoming the fastest growing source of click fraud. Ensuring their quality is essential for the pay per click advertising market to continue its growth.”

The growth of click fraud is not a surprise to industry insiders. The writing has been on the wall for some time. The real question is whether the PPC industry will devote less time to spin control and more to transparent reporting and click fraud prevention. The “trust us” approach to doing business could drag the entire industry into the junk bin of once great ideas.

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