Pay-per-click fraud rises to 14.8 percent

Click Forensics, the firm that tracks click fraud using campaign data from over 3,500 marketers, this week reported that PPC click fraud increased to 14.8 percent in Q1 2007. That's the highest level in the last twelve months and 1.1 percent up on the same period last year. The Q4 2006 click fraud rate was 14.2 percent.

"Click fraud seems to be following a similar path as other online fraud schemes such as spam and phishing -- the problem is growing as fraudsters fine-tune their methods," said Click Forensics president and CEO Tom Cuthbert.

The largest increase in click fraud was seen on search engine content networks, with a rise of almost 3 percent from Q4 2006, to 22 percent.

“Content networks are more vulnerable to click fraud because search engines have less control over them and we are seeing that reflected in our quarterly numbers,” said Karl Scholz, spokesman for Click Forensics.

Yahoo and Google have previously made it known that they are trying to solve the click fraud problem, with Yahoo recently appointing a “click fraud tzar”. Google was the first search engine to address the problem and developed new reporting that showed clients the number of invalid clicks that had been rejected, and giving more insight in to their methodology.

Tags: Click Forensics, click fraud, Google, pay-per-click, PPC, Yahoo