Armies of bots raise click fraud rates

Botnets, or ‘zombie armies’, refers to a group of computers that, although their owners are unaware of it, have been set up to forward data transmissions, including spam and viruses, to other computers on the Internet. In the U.S. alone, the FBI has identified around 1 million such computers.

Traffic from botnets increased slightly from 14.1 percent in Q2 2006, to 14.8 percent in Q1 2007. However, between Q1 and Q2 of 2007 it jumped to 15.8 percent.

In addition, Click Forensics found that click fraud on content publishing networks has also risen from 21.9 percent in Q1 2007, to 25.6 percent in Q2. They conclude that botnets are driving up click fraud.

Click fraud costs advertisers money. Advertisers have long complained that they are being unfairly refunded for fraudulent clicks. Both Google and Yahoo keep relatively schtum about their click fraud data but both insist their records shows click fraud rates to be well below Click Forensics’ findings. Instead of the 25 percent that Click Forensics' calculates, the search engines report rates of around 10 percent (Google) and between 12 and 15 percent (Yahoo).

Recent Google upgrades have made it easier for advertisers to manage their sites and better avoid click fraud hotspots such as ‘made for advertising’ websites.

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