WebProNews

Rates decline in Q1, but rise year over year

Figures from Click Forensics showed a decline in click fraud rates for the first quarter of 2008, although they were higher year over year.

More active filtering on the part of Google and Yahoo may be having its desired impact, in keeping more illicit clicks away from advertisers and their budgets.

Pay per click (PPC) management vendor Click Forensics said its Click Fraud Index picked up some positive figures for Q1 2008. Their assessment of PPC across large and small business campaigns at the top search engines provided these tidbits:

• The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.3 percent for Q1 2008. That’s down slightly from the 16.6 percent rate reported for Q4 2007 and up from the 14.8 percent click fraud rate reported for Q1 2007.
• The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 27.8 percent. That’s down from the 28.3 percent rate reported for Q4 2007 and up from the 21.9 percent average click fraud rate reported for Q1 2007.
• Q1 2008 click fraud traffic from botnets was 8 percent higher than click fraud traffic from botnets in Q4 2007.
• In Q1 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from Monaco (3.1 percent), Ghana (3.1 percent), and New Caledonia (2.4 percent).

"Our Q1 2008 data bears out what industry analysts have suspected for several months - Yahoo! and Google seem to be finally filtering out more of the click fraud and non-converting traffic they used to let through," Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics, said in the announcement.

Click fraud remains a contentious issue for search engines and webmasters, who share the same goal of eliminating it to the extent they can. However, search engine reticence to share a peek at their inner workings with advertisers, due to concerns about how such revelations could be misused, keeps advertisers at arm's length.