Click Fraud Network Releases Q2 2007 Figures
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Written By Drupad Sil | July 20, 2007 | Share This
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The Click Fraud Network released a report earlier today stating that click fraud increased to 15.8% for Q2 2007.
The Click Fraud Network is a community of online advertisers, agencies, and search providers that provide data and work together to develop an industry solution to the problem of click fraud. Click fraud is formally defined as an internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates the legitimate use of a web browser clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actually interest in the target of the ad’s link.
The report released by the Click Fraud Network puts Q2 2007 click fraud at 15.8%, one percent higher than Q1 2007, and 1.7% higher than the same quarter 2006. Other key findings showed an increase in click fraud rates on search engine content networks, like Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network, moving up to 25.6% from 21.6% the previous quarter. Also, outside of North America, the greatest percentage of click fraud occurs in France, China, and Australia,
The main reason put forth by the Click Fraud Network for the increasing instances of click fraud is a noticeable increase in botnets, parked domain sites, and made-for-AdSense (MFA) sites. A botnet is a bot created with a Trojan that causes redirection of links and other connections to specified ads, artificially increasing the click-through rate. MFAs are pages created around AdSense keywords to ensure content is geared towards high-paying AdSense keywords, violating Google’s policy of making sure site content is relevant to the search.
On how the Click Fraud Network generates its data:
“Click fraud data is tracked and published on a quarterly basis for specific search providers, industries and trends. The service is unique in that it monitors online campaigns for click fraud by correlating data collected from search provider campaigns and the advertisers’ own web sites – providing the industry’s most accurate view of click fraud to date,”
We’ll have to see how search engines, advertisers, and internet security firms work to deal with the growing issue of botnets and fraudulent advertising. Regulation and litigation in this industry is slow because of a lack of understanding of the information and the rapidity of growth and change inherent to internet-related law, but that shouldn’t stop groups like the Click Fraud Network from finding new ways to stunt the growth of this newest form of spam.
Topics: Advertising: Online, Click Fraud, Google, Yahoo! |