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Detected click fraud that must be refunded to advertisers occupies a minuscule bit of all the clicks on ads run by Google's clients. Let the click fraud debate begin again. Google has put a number to the click fraud it misses and must reimburse to its AdWords clients. It's a teeny tiny number: 0.02 percent.

Danny Sullivan discussed the number and other click fraud concepts on his site. He anticipates critics will be out in force to decry a figure they have pegged at much higher percentages than this. Danny asked the big question of Google about this figure. People have wanted this number for years, so why has it finally been made public?:

"We've been working to be more transparent and informative on the issues related to click fraud. Recently, this metric has been something advertisers have specifically asked for and we agree that is useful in describing the scope of the problem. Further, it is something we measure and use to monitor the performance of our click fraud detection systems," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for trust & safety at Google.

People should realize that the 0.02 percent figure refers to detected click fraud. This is what Danny means by click fraud rate, and it only refers to clicks that get past Google's multiple layers of filtering, and require a manual investigation to identify them for a refund.

According to Ghosemajumder, the overall click fraud rate is in single digits. "The overall rate can fluctuate. We've said before that this is in the single digits and want to clarify that this means it's from one to nine percent. It's not zero, but these are lower bounds," he said in the report.

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