The Click Fraud Network released (press release) figures for the second quarter of this year, showing click fraud has increase to 15.8% from 14.8% in the previous quarter or 14.1% from Q2 2006.

One of the reasons for the increase, according to The Click Fraud Network, is a noticeable increase in botnets, parked domain sites and made-for-AdSense sites. The data comes from 4,000 online advertisers and agencies.

Here are the key findings:

• The overall industry average click fraud rate was 15.8 percent for Q2 2007. This is an increase from 14.1 percent for the same quarter in 2006 and 14.8 percent for Q1 2007.
• The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 25.6 percent. That’s up from 21.9 percent for Q1 2007 and 19.2 percent for Q4 of 2006.
• Traffic from botnets doubled from Q1 to Q2 2007 and contributed significantly to the increase in click fraud rates.
• In Q2 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from France (5.1 percent), China (3.2 percent) and Australia (3 percent).

The Click Fraud Network also published an interesting heat map showing the threat of click fraud by geographic area.

Keep in mind, Google and Yahoo have their own figures for click fraud and they do not match up with these numbers because of different measuring methodologies and also because discounted clicks aren’t measured by the CFN. See our click fraud category for more about this, in the stories listed there.

Related Topics: Legal: Clickfraud

About The Author: 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. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz