Report: Click Fraud Rate Drops to 19.1% In Q4 2010

Click Forensics quarterly report on overall click fraud was released for the fourth quarter of 2010. They said the click fraud rate dropped from 22.3 percent in the previous quarter to 19.1% in the fourth quarter of 2010.

This is the first decline in click fraude reported by Click Forensics since Q2 2009. As you can see from the chart below, the rate has increased from quarter to quarter:

click fraud data q3 2010

Click Forensics uses traffic from over 300 ad networks to produce these reports. Here are their key highlights:

  • The overall industry average click fraud rate was 19.1 percent. That’s lower than the 22.3 percent reported for Q3 2010, but higher than the 15.3 rate reported for Q4 2009.
  • The Click Forensics Malware Lab identified a new malware scheme targeting display banner ads. The sophisticated program performs a pop-up or pop-under and rotates brand advertisers’ banner ads every 10-15 min in an effort to seemingly boost impression figures. Click Forensics researchers are working diligently to quantify the impact of this new scheme.
  • In Q4 2010, the countries outside North America producing the greatest volume of click fraud were Japan, The Netherlands, Philippines, Sweden and France, respectively.

For more information, see their Click Fraud Index.

Heat Map

Related Stories:

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Legal: Clickfraud | Stats: General


About The Author: is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here.

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  • http://www.ezanga.com/news/ WillC

    Interesting. I wonder what caused the decline. With the monthly increases, I feel like its almost expected since there’s always someone working to scam. With advertising going onto so many different platforms like social networks and mobile, it seemed like it wasn’t really going to stop because there would be new ways to fraud.

    So I’d be interested in seeing what’s behind the decline. I know there was talk about something Google was doing as sort of an an alternative to AdSense at the end of last year. eZanga just released its own click fraud technology called Traffic Advisors also. Maybe there’s is just a better fight put up against current fraud techniques.

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