It’s been 18 months or so since Google’s $90 million settlement on the issue of click fraud. Since then, the search engine giant has continued to maintain that click fraud is not that serious a problem. Click Forensics, however, begs to differ.
Billing itself as an online version of television's Nielsen ratings, Click Forensics released figures for the third quarter of 2007 that track click fraud. They aren't pretty. According to the company, a little over 16 percent of all online ad clicks are fraudulent. That's a rise of more than three percent from the same period last year.
Sadly, those are the best figures that Click Forensics reported. Taking a close look at the traffic on the major search engine networks, such as Google's AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, revealed click fraud rates of around 28 percent for the third quarter of 2007. That's particularly disheartening because the rates for the same time last year were more than two percent lower - and the rates for the first three months of this year were just under 22 percent.
And the bad news just keeps coming. For parked domains and "made for AdSense" sites designed specifically to funnel traffic to advertisers for money, Click Forensics said the click fraud rate was more than 60 percent for the third quarter of 2007. When click fraud rates go this high, many expect smart advertisers to start putting their money elsewhere.
Click Forensics CEO Tom Cuthbert believes we're seeing that trend already. ""The issue of click fraud on these major networks is becoming a real problem for advertisers, and increasingly, they are choosing to stay away and look into alternatives," Cuthbert insists. He's particularly upset at Google and Yahoo for not doing a better job of ferreting out click fraud. His company puts its figures together from statistics provided by 4,000 advertisers and agencies participating in its Click Fraud Network group.
Click Forensics is not a totally disinterested party. It wants to develop itself into an "objective third party" used by advertisers and even the search engines themselves for identifying online ad fraud. So naturally it has a vested interest in hyping the numbers. But is there some truth behind those statistics?
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