Click Fraud Rises for 4th Consecutive Quarter

Click Fraud as a percentage of total pay per click activity rose to 15.8% according to invalid click monitoring body Click Fraud Network. This is a rise on click fraud for the 4th consecutive quarter.

According to the report, the key findings for Q2 of 2007 were:

* The overall industry average click fraud rate was 15.8 percent for Q2 2007. This is an increase from 14.1 percent for the same quarter in 2006 and 14.8 percent for Q1 2007.
* The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 25.6 percent. That’s up from 21.9 percent for Q1 2007 and 19.2 percent for Q4 of 2006.
* Traffic from botnets doubled from Q1 to Q2 2007 and contributed significantly to the increase in click fraud rates.
* In Q2 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from France (5.1 percent), China (3.2 percent) and Australia (3 percent).

The Click Fraud Network collects anonimised data via it's monitoring product Click Forensics. This product works by inserting tracking code into web pages and reporting back to a central server in much the same way as Google Analytics. This service is free to advertisers who have less than 100,000 paid clicks per month, and chargeable for larger users.

Full detail of the report are available on the Click Fraud Network