clicks report

The level of fraudulent clicks continues to rise, according to data from a  recent study by Click Forensics.   The study estimates that during the first three months of 2010, 18.6% of registered clicks had a fraudulent nature; this percentage represents a strong increase with respect to the 17.4% figure from the first quarter of the year and 12.7% registered during the second quarter of 2009.  Most of those clicks come from the following countries: Singapore, Pakistan, Japan, Ukraine and China.

This type of fraud tends to be carried out by site owners trying to increase their profits (through CPC campaigns) or by advertisers trying to reduce their rivals’ budgets (such as with Google AdWords campaigns).  In many cases, ads are placed on pages with no content, so that they can later generate clicks by using robots that produce clicks from infected computers.  A large percentage of this kind of click is filtered through tools used by agencies or advertisers.  Despite all this, these kinds of fraudulent actions produce millions of dollars of annual losses for advertisers.  On one hand, the growth of the online ad market, and on the other hand the sophistication of the methods used, means that this kind of fraud will only increase.

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