Data recently released by Click Forensics reveals that click fraud has reduced in the second quarter of 2009.
Click fraud has reduced not only compared to what it was in the first quarter of the year, but also compared to what it was in the second quarter of 2008. At present it is 12.7%, while in the first quarter of 2009 it was 13.8% and in the second quarter of 2008 it was 16.2%.
According to Click Forensics this data has been collected from ad campaigns of large as well as small advertisers spread over all of the leading search engines and over 300 ad networks.
The president of Click Forensics, Tom Cuthbert says, “The increased diligence of online ad networks to detect and block invalid traffic sources has contributed to the decline in the over all click fraud rate this quarter. However increasingly sophisticated attacks, such as publisher collusion fraud, continue to be a concern. Ad networks should pay close attention to such threats in the coming months.”
Publisher collusion fraud is a lot more difficult to track as publishers make use of bots and rotating IP-addresses to click on their own ads, thus raising their rankings and also increasing the commission which they earn from the ad networks, which cannot easily detect such invalid clicks from the valid ones.
These ad networks consist of lesser known sites that still manage to reach large audiences, at a much lower cost than the bigger, well known internet sites.
