AUSTIN, Texas - The average click-fraud rate increased 15 percent in 2007, and 16.6 percent of all clicks on Web ads were fraudulent by the end of the year, according to new data Click Forensics released from the Click Fraud Index.
Click fraud for search-engine ad networks such as Google AdSense and the Yahoo! Publisher Network was up 47 percent in the fourth quarter and ended the year at 28.3 percent.
"In 2007, we saw a significant jump in the industry average click-fraud rate, when compared with the average rate for 2006," Click Forensics President and CEO Tom Cuthbert said in the report. "As the FBI and USA Today have reported, fraudsters are using more sophisticated means to perpetrate click fraud, including infiltrating mom-and-pop e-commerce sites. As a result, it's more important than ever before for advertisers, publishers, ad networks and search engines to cooperate and share data in order to stem what's on target to be an even worse problem in 2008."
However, the click-fraud rates remained fairly steady, compared to the third quarter of 2007, when the overall rate was 16.2 percent and the rate for search engines was 28.1 percent.
Key findings of Click Forensics' report for the fourth quarter of 2007 include:
- The overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for the fourth quarter of 2007, up from 14.2 percent for the fourth quarter of 2006. The click-fraud rate for the third quarter of 2007 was 16.2 percent.
- The average click-fraud rate for pay-per-click advertisements on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo! Publisher Network, was 28.3 percent for the fourth quarter of 2007, up from 19.2 percent for the fourth quarter in 2006. The rate for the third quarter of 2007 was 28.1 percent.
- The industry average click-fraud rate for 2007 grew 15 percent over the rate for 2006.
- Click-fraud traffic from botnets was 15 percent higher in the fourth quarter of 2007 than in the third quarter of 2007.
- In the fourth quarter of 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America was from India (4.3 percent), Germany (3.9 percent) and South Korea (3.7 percent).
The Click Fraud Index observes and reports information gathered from the Click Fraud Network to more than 4,000 online advertising and agency members.
