SEO Blog

Click Fraud is one of those blockbuster issues that are inarguably important but often pushed to the backburner in lieu of an industry consensus and solid solutions. Estimated to range between 5% and 20% of all pay-per-click traffic, click fraud is said to cost its victims (PPC advertisers) over $1Billion per year. Advertisers involved with pay-per-click marketing should, by now, have some knowledge of click fraud, or at least understand it is a potential threat. For those who don’t, two of the heaviest hitters in the mainstream media carry stories detailing the issue of click fraud.

On Saturday (Sept 23, 2006), the New York Times published technology writer Karen J. Bannan’s story, “Click Fraud is Growing on the Web”. The October 2nd edition of Business Week Magazine will hit store shelves featuring cover story, “Click Fraud – The dark side of online advertising”.

Both stories note advertiser frustration with increasing costs and decreasing conversions. In the Business Week article, PPC advertiser Martin Fleischmann is quoted saying click fraud “… has cost his business more than $100,000 since 2003.” The New York Times quotes Joe Tedd, another PPC advertiser, saying his company lost $17,000 over seven months to click fraud. “In November, we saw the number of searches going up on all the engines we had placement on,’’ Mr. Tedd said. “But while all the other engines were seeing higher conversion rates, this one engine was doing so poorly, we actually took the campaign offline.”