Click Fraud Rate Declines Slightly, Says Click Forensics

Click Forensics released their statistics on the click fraud rate for the first quarter of 2008, showing a click fraud rate of 16.3 percent. That number is down from the previous quarter, which was 16.6 percent. Compared to a year ago, when the click fraud rate was 14.8 percent, we are up.

Click fraud on the content network was at 27.8 percent, down from the 28.3 percent rate a quarter earlier but up from a year before at 21.9 percent.

As Chris said last year, and I will repeat here:

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.