Estimated Click Fraud Rate Remains At 16%, Says Click Forensics

Click Forensics has released their estimated 3rd quarter click fraud numbers that they track. The numbers remain pretty much the same, at least as it pertains to the overall estimated industry average click fraud rate. The rate is now 16.0%, down from last quarter’s 16.2%. The main change was that botnets were said to be […]

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Click Forensics has released their estimated 3rd quarter click fraud numbers that they track. The numbers remain pretty much the same, at least as it pertains to the overall estimated industry average click fraud rate. The rate is now 16.0%, down from last quarter’s 16.2%.

The main change was that botnets were said to be responsible for 27.6 percent of the click fraud, up 10% from last quarter.

The average estimated click fraud rate of on the content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 27.1 percent, which is down from the 27.6 percent rate of the previous quarter. Click fraud was said to originate mostly from Russia (4.9 percent), France (4.8 percent) and the U.K. (3.5 percent) according to Click Forensics.

Like 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.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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