Online Advertising: Click Frauds Increasing at Alarming Rate
Click Forensics, a company that monitors traffic quality for the online
advertising community, has released industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud
figures for the fourth quarter 2008. The industry average click fraud
rate grew to 17.1% for Q4 2008. That’s up from 16.0% in Q3 2008 and from
the 16.6% rate reported for Q4 2007.
The
findings have come from the search advertising industry’s click fraud
reporting service – the Click Fraud Index.
The
Click Fraud Index monitors and reports on data gathered from the Click
Fraud Network, which provides industry PPC data collected from
online
advertising campaigns for both large and small companies across all the
leading search engines.
Key
findings from data reported for Q4 2008 include:
- The overall industry
average click fraud rate grew to 17.1% for Q4 2008. That’s up from
16.0% in Q3 2008 and from the 16.6% rate reported for Q4 2007.
- The average click fraud
rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content
networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network,
was 28.2%. That’s up from the 27.1% rate reported for Q3 2008 and down
slightly from the 28.3% rate reported for Q4 2007.
- Traffic from botnets was
responsible for 31.4% of all click fraud traffic in Q4 2008. That’s up
from the 27.6% rate reported for Q3 2008 and the 22.0% rate reported
for Q4 2007.
- In Q4 2008, the greatest
percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside the U.S.
came from Canada (7.4%), Germany (3.0%), and China (2.3%).
“Based
on the data we tracked in Q4 2008, it seems that the online advertising
industry is not immune to the growing tide of cybercrime during this
recessionary period,” said Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics.
“Both the overall click fraud rate and the rate of click fraud
originating from botnets were the highest ever in Q4 2008. In addition,
we’ve started to see old schemes like click farms reemerge. Advertisers
should pay close attention to these types of threats in their online
campaigns throughout the year.”
The
Click Fraud Index publishes data collected from the Click Fraud Network,
a third-party click fraud detection service dedicated to helping
companies accurately monitor their online advertising campaigns for
pay-per-click fraud.
