Audit Firm Finds Click Fraud on the Rise
A quarterly report by a company that audits pay-per-click advertising using a network of volunteer marketers reported last week that 14.8% of clicks across the search marketing industry were fraudulent in Q1 2007.
That compares to an overall fraud rate of 13.7% during the same period in 2006, according to Austin TX-based Click Forensics, which operates the Click Fraud Network that monitors fraud reports from more than 3500 online advertisers.
In Q4 2006, the network reported an overall click fraud index of 14.2%.
The Click Fraud Index found that the fraud rate for pay-per-click ads on search engine content networks was higher than the overall rate at 21.9%, compared to 19.2% in Q4 2006.
Click Forensics also reported that the average fraud rate for high-priced search terms — those costing more than $2 per click — was 22.2% for the first quarter of the year. That rate is higher than the 20.9% average the auditor detected in both Q4 and Q3 2006.
Click Forensics president and CEO Tom Cuthbert said in a release that click fraud perpetrators appear to be keeping pace with search engine efforts to detect them. “Click fraud seems to be following a similar path as other online fraud schemes such as spam and phishing,” he said in a release. “The problem is growing as fraudsters fine-tune their methods.
