Google click fraud a serious problem

Click fraud, as defined by The Marketing Experiments Journal, is "any paid-for-click that originates in a malicious attempt to drain an advertiser's budget". Occasionally advertisers will try to drive up their competitors' marketing costs by clicking on ads for high-priced search terms.

The experiment was conducted with the Los Angeles-based pay-per-click (PPC) clicks2customers.com and focused on three PPC campaigns over a 10 day period. Duplicate clicks were detected by checking IP addresses, browser settings, time of the click, operating systems, country of origin and language.

Flint McGlaughlin of MEC labs said that people committing the fraud were more likely to be using specially designed programs or sophisticated devices, rather than repeatedly clicking on an ad over and over. "Our random sample of PPC campaigns uncovered as much as 29.5 percent PPC fraud and showed that Google was able to account for and credit only a tiny portion of those fraudulent charges," said McGlaughlin. He added, "Companies should be aware of how big of a problem it really is and be equipped to more aptly detect it." µ

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Marketingexperiments.com