Industry Click Fraud Rate Rises

Click Forensics, Inc. released industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures for the fourth quarter 2007 from the search advertising industry's leading independent click fraud reporting service – the Click Fraud Index(TM) (http://www.clickfraudindex.com/).

The overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for Q4 2007. That's up from the 14.2 percent click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 16.2 percent for Q3 2007.

The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.3 percent in Q4 2007. That's up from the 19.2 percent average click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 28.1 percent for Q3 2007.

The 2007 industry average click fraud rate grew by 15 percent over the industry average click fraud rate for 2006.

Q4 2007 click fraud traffic from botnets was 15 percent higher than click fraud traffic from botnets in Q3 2007.

In Q4 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from India (4.3 percent) Germany (3.9 percent) and South Korea (3.7 percent).