Click Fraud Rise Or Fall? Click Fraud 22.9% Or 12.7%

Today, I received two click fraud reports from two different companies. The first was from Anchor Intelligence and the second was from Click Forensics. Anchor Intelligence reported a click fraud rate of 22.9% for the second quarter of 2009, up from 21.7% in the first quarter. While Click Forensics reports a click fraud rate of 12.7% in the second quarter of 2009, down from 13.8% in the first quarter. That is a 10 plus point difference in the click fraud rate, reported by these two agencies. Who should you believe?

Click Fraud can be measured on many different levels. Anchor broke out their click fraud rates by two types of “invalid” clicks, “attempted click fraud” which was the 22.9% rate and “innocuous invalid” which was 4.2% rate, a total of 27.1% in invalid clicks for last quarter.

You can obtain the full report from Anchor Intelligence over here. Click Forensics report can be seen over here

Each company has their own data sources, measurements and definitions for reporting on click fraud. Like always, when reporting on click fraud, you need to keep these things in mind.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz 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's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.