Click Fraud Rate Mostly Unchanged, Says Click Forensics

Jul 22, 2008 at 4:33pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Click Forensics has released the second quarter results for 2008, showing a slight drop in the estimated click fraud. Last quarter, Click Forensics reported a 16.3 percent rate, and they are now reporting a 16.2 percent rate for Q2 of 2008. However, the rate is up from a year ago, which was a 15.8 percent rate in Q2 of 2007.

The main number that stood out was that “traffic from botnets was responsible for more than 25 percent of all click fraud traffic in Q2 2008,” said Click Forensics. Click Forensics believes the botnets increase was the reason why the click fraud rate did not drop more than it should have.

Here are the latest charts:

Click Forensics Q2 2008 Results Click Forensics Q2 2008 Results Click Forensics Q2 2008 Results

As always, keep in mind Chris Sherman’s advice when looking at these figures:

At first glance, these numbers may seem alarming, but they may not take into account the discounting of questionable clicks done by most search engines. In fact, Google has stated that click fraud amounts to just .02% of all clicks after it allows for other non-converting clicks. See Danny’s Google: Click Fraud Is 0.02% Of Clicks for a detailed look at how Google analyzes clicks and why its number of fraudulent clicks is so much lower than that reported by Click Forensics.

The only difference now is that Click Forensics and Yahoo have teamed up to build a tool to track click fraud.


Barry Schwartz 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.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

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