SEO Blog

Click Forensics have just released a press release highlighting the fact that pay per click fraud for Q3 2008 was 16%, a slight reduction on the previous quarter and the same period in 2007.

Pay Per Click Fraud Rate by Quarter

This data is taken from their Click Fraud Index.

Unfortunately, the UK is listed as one of the PPC fraud hot spots accounting for 3.5% of all fraudulent activity.

If you’re a pay per click advertiser, clearly you need to be vigilant with your traffic. There are professional solutions available for anyone wishing to monitor their paid traffic closely or, as reported last month, there is a simple solution if you do suspect click fraud and want to monitor your traffic.

We recently had reason to suspect that one of our client’s PPC campaigns was being targeted by one of their competitors. We suspected that they were clicking the ads to try and use up the daily budget early in the day. The trouble was how to identify who was clicking the Ads.

There are many expensive Click Fraud solutions available but we found a simple and free way of checking who was clicking the ads by using Statcounter.

By putting the Statcounter code on the website pages we were able to easily see the IP addresses of the clickers. This clearly showed that two Competitors were in fact clicking the ads. We then forwarded our findings to Google and hope this will result in a refund for our AdWords client.