Click fraud is one of the unfortunate bi-products of online paid search. It occurs when an individual or automated program deliberately clicks on certain advertisements, thus triggering an automatic charge, despite having no interest in the actual content.
News that it has dropped to 12.7% for the second quarter of 2009 should come as a reassurance to all online advertisers. Google and the other major search engines have been making huge strides in reducing the possibility of this kind of fraud occurring. In fact, these latest figures show a significant drop since the same quarter last year where the figure stood at 16.2%.
Paid search still remains one of the most targeted and effective ways of reaching out to an audience. Whilst overall advertising numbers have dwindled since the start of the global recession, few would argue that it remains an invaluable resource for smaller companies looking to even the playing field against the larger corporations.
There is still a lot that needs to be done in order to combat click fraud, but this does show that steady progress is being made. With increased safety comes greater efficiency, with improved efficiency comes better profitability; all of which makes PPC one of the best ways to get targeted traffic directly to your site.
Review our services page if you’re interested in Impact Media’s pay per click advertising services, which include professional management and continual analysis of all your campaigns. If you suspect click fraud, there is free and effective solution available.
This refers to malicious clicks on paid search adverts which are not from genuine customers. This can be competitors trying to spend their competitions budget.
Google itself does keep an eye on this and if it detects it your account will be credited to compensate.
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 Pay per Click 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.
