Google releases more click fraud data

According to Google’s Adwords blog, click fraud accounts for less than 10 percent of all clicks. With every invalid click costing Google $100 million/year in possible revenue, that adds up to almost $1 billion lost. It is up to Google to choose to filter potentially fraudulent clicks.

Each time an ad is clicked it costs the advertiser a small fee which is paid to the internet ad provider. Click-fraud is mainly about driving up the costs to competitors by maliciously clicking on their ads, sometimes hundreds or thousands of times. Google has filters in place to optimize ROI and catch any attacks.

"In most cases where malicious activity is found, the clicks have already been filtered out (and not charged for) by our real-time filters,” says Google's blog. “Because of the broad operation of our proactive detection, the relatively rare cases we find of advertisers being affected by undetected click fraud constitute less than 0.02% of all clicks."

To further combat click-fraud, Google is releasing more tools including a process by which they can alert Google to specific suspicious internet addresses and a central resource centre to address advertiser queries.

Tags: AdWords, click fraud, Google