May 18, 2007 Comments
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Information Week reports on new data from Fair Isaac Corp. that pegs click fraud rates at 10% to 15% of billed paid search clicks. If you remember though, that number doesn't exactly mesh with Google's claim that less than 2% of clicks are fraudulent and that Google screens most of those before the customer ever sees a bill, but it does match up with Click Forensics claim of 14.2% earlier this year.
From the article:
"The search engines certainly have a lot of smart people," said Milana, "but I don't believe they alone can solve this problem. And the reason for that is they don't have a complete view of what happens to a click when it arrives at an advertiser's site."
Ads on search sites aren't the problem, said Milana. Rather, the issue arises with ad networks where publishers host ads on their sites supplied by the likes of Google or Yahoo.
Of course it's next to impossible to figure out the exact rate of click fraud, especially since so many "bad clicks" are simply a result of poorly crafted paid search campaigns.
That's why it's absolutely essential to track your campaigns well enough to know your ROI. Whether click fraud exists or not, if you can't make money off of your paid search campaigns, you shouldn't be running them.
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