To address more than 25 percent of all click fraud, Click Forensics, Inc., today released industry pay-per-click fraud figures for the second quarter 2008 – data gathered from the search advertising industry’s leading independent click fraud reporting service, the Click Fraud Index. Click Fraud Network is growing day by day as more than 4,000 online advertisers and agencies have joined this network.

 

The index states that the average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks was 27.6 percent. This includes well known advertisers such as Google (News - Alert) AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network. While this figure is up from the 25.6 percent average click fraud rate reported for Q1 2007, this is also down from the 27.8 percent rate reported for Q1 2008. The statistically significant industry PPC data collected by the Click Fraud Network includes online advertising campaigns for both large and small companies across all the leading search engines, officials say.

 

In Q2 2008, overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.2 percent, according to the company. That’s down slightly from the 16.3 percent rate reported for Q1 2008 and up from the 15.8 percent click fraud rate reported for Q2 2007, officials say. Also, in what the company calls an alarming first, traffic from botnets was responsible for more than 25 percent of all click fraud traffic in Q2 2008. In Q2 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from China (4.3 percent), Russia (3.5 percent), and France (3.2 percent).

 

“Although click fraud rates were relatively unchanged in the second quarter, we found that the methods used to commit click fraud have become increasingly more sophisticated and difficult to detect,” said Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics. “The threat from botnets is the biggest concern as they have grown to cause over one quarter of all click fraud. Online advertisers should be extra vigilant in watching for traffic from botnets in their search marketing campaigns.