Advertiser Click Fraud Fears Increase
A recent article at eMarketer discusses advertisers’ fears of click fraud. They cite a SEMPO survey indicating that click fraud has tripled to 16%. (Presumably this is the number of clicks thought to be fraudulent; the article isn’t clear.) Other studies indicate that almost half of all companies and agencies have experienced click fraud, and that most of the increase comes from affiliates attempting to manipulate click-revenues.
What does this mean for your company? Not much. First, there is very little reliable data describing the problem of click fraud, and it can vary industry-to-industry and company-to-company. If the assertion that most of the increase in fraud is from affiliate sites, then there’s no impact for the majority of companies that don’t employ them. If you’re using the content network in AdWords or Yahoo Sponsored Search, you’re probably more likely to experience some click fraud.
All this being said, you have probably had some fraudulent ad clicks, and for most companies with small to medium budgets, it’s the cost of doing business. Looking for, identifying, documenting, reporting to the search engines, and pursuing refunds will be more expensive than accepting the fraud in the majority of cases for all but the biggest campaigns and those circumstances where a concerted effort is being made to manipulate your ads.
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