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 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.

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