Click Fraud Decreases On Yahoo!, Google
One of the biggest concerns facing the PPC/text ads/SEM industry is click fraud. In case you are new to this, click fraud is where ads are clicked in order to increase the earnings of the site displaying the ad. Click fraud can also be done against competitors to drain their advertising budget as well.
The two biggest advertisers in the search engine marketing game, Yahoo! and Google, have indicated a number of times click fraud is one the biggest challenges their advertising service faces. With that being the case, the two companies undoubtedly welcomed the news from Click Forensics, which reported click fraud rates had dropped from 12.8 percent during the second quarter to 11.9 percent for the third. The drop affected all top level search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.
Overall, click fraud rates were lower during the third quarter, coming in at 13.8 percent. The second quarter percentage was 14.1, while the first quarter had a rate of 13.7 percent. Expect the fourth quarter to see a slight increase in these numbers with the holiday season fast approaching and increased PPC spending. It certainly sounds like fertile ground for the fraudulent clicker.
Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews
Hopefully, this is correct information. I still don’t understand how anyone (Click Forensics) can track click fraud. But, with anything in life, there is always a upside and a downside.