WebProNews

Over 4,000 advertisers have joined the Click Fraud Network and a significant number of those sites provide data using page tags and/or weblogs to the network for daily analysis and reporting.

Advertiser data and conversion data is the key to detecting click fraud and click quality issues - and most search engines and ad networks do not have access to the full weblogs - so, they use simple rules to make an educated guess at whether the click activity is invalid, malicious, or unwanted. If they are not sure (or do not have enough data to determine validity) they bill advertisers for the click.

Google and Yahoo will continue to claim the Click Fraud Index is too high (although Yahoo recently admitted to filtering 12 - 15% of clicks) or the sample set is too small, etc.

Advertisers should check it out for themselves - it's simple to setup and for most advertisers, it's free when you join the Click Fraud Network (up to 100,000 ad clicks per month).

Kevin Embree
SVP, Product Strategy
Click Forensics