Click Forensics released their PPC fraud numbers for Q2 of 2008. The data is reports from data gathered from 4,000+ online agencies and advertisers across various industries.

• In Q2 2008, the industry average flick fraud rate was 16.2%. Down slightly from 16.3% in Q1 but higher than 15.8% of Q2 2007.
• Content Networks Fraud was 27.6%. Down slightly from 27.8% in Q1 2008, but up from 25.6% in Q1 2007.
• Most fraud originated from non-North American countries. China & Russia was responsible for 7.8% of all fraud.
• Botnet continues to grow in its sophistication and was responsible for more than 25% of all click fraud in Q2 2008.

Click Fraud companies have generally claimed a 12-20% click fraud rate, while search engines claim that % to more around the 2-6% range. Last year, click fraud became the hottest topic in search engine circles but have died down over the course of a year. During that time, the search engines have focused heavily on cracking down on click fraud and started to raise their communication level on what is being done with this issue. I personally believe the engines do a decent job of catching the majority of the fraud before it gets to our wallets, but there is always lots of room to improve. One thing that needs to be done is to standardize what click fraud entails as lot of what is being consider “fraud” is simply the nature of search engines and should be baked into the ROI data analysis. Having said that, here at LeadQual we work hard to catch any oddities, strange spikes and deal with the processes necessary to obtain refunds when there seems to be no other explanation.

Note: In our experience Google has been more helpful in digging into abnormalities and figuring out what caused the shift in the data than of Yahoo. Yahoo doesn’t explain what happened much, but they are more willing to shell out refunds as needed. (Can’t hurt to cultivate some competition right?).

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - Search Engine Marketing

Tags: Click Fraud, google, Search Engine Marketing, SEM, yahoo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.