Click Fraud Worse During The Recession
By Anna Johnson on May 15th, 2009The New York Times reports that click fraud – unlawfully clicking on pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements – has worsened during the recession.
Internet marketers are pouring more of their online advertising budgets into PPC advertising – according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, it accounted for 57 percent of Internet advertising in 2008, up from 52 percent in 2007. But it looks as though more of those PPC expenditures are being wasted too…
Cars.com, for example, knew something was wrong when a substantial number of clicks on its NewCars.com ads came from countries such as Bulgaria, Indonesia and the Czech Republic… countries where it wasn’t trading. It determined that the rate of click fraud was 12-15 percent.
Meanwhile, Outsell Inc. reckons 13 percent of online advertising clicks in 2008 were fraudulent, while Click Forensics says 17 percent of clicks in the fourth quarter of 2008 were fraudulent.
Google, meanwhile, says fraudulent clicks account for just 0.02 percent of all clicks.
Problem is… Google gets paid whenever someone clicks on the PPC ads on its search engine or content network, so it isn’t exactly ‘naturally’ motivated to emphasize the problem. Funnily enough, even Yahoo, its main PPC rival and beneficiary, disputes that fraudulent clicks could be below 1 percent.
All this indicates to me that we can’t expect much help from, say, Google to combat the click-fraud problem. As Internet marketers, it’s up to use to monitor where our pay-per-click clicks are coming from and possibly engage professional help to clamp down on fraud if we think it exists.
