Click Fraud Index

Click Fraud Index - Overall Click Fraud Index - Content Networks

Click Fraud Index - High Threat Heat Map

Derived using average threat level across all industries and keywords monitored by the Click Fraud Network. Threat Level is identified as having a high attribute rating score as measured by the Click Forensics rating engine using data provided by members of the Click Fraud Network

Now in its third year, the Click Fraud Index monitors and reports on data gathered from the Click Fraud Network™, which more than 4,000 online advertisers and agencies have joined. The Click Fraud Network provides statistically significant industry PPC data collected from online advertising campaigns for both large and small companies across all the leading search engines. Key findings from data reported for Q1 2008 include:

  • The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.3 percent for Q1 2008. That's down slightly from the 16.6 percent rate reported for Q4 2007 and up from the 14.8 percent click fraud rate reported for Q1 2007.
  • The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 27.8 percent. That's down from the 28.3 percent rate reported for Q4 2007 and up from the 21.9 percent average click fraud rate reported for Q1 2007.
  • Q1 2008 click fraud traffic from botnets was 8 percent higher than click fraud traffic from botnets in Q4 2007.
  • In Q1 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from Monaco (3.1 percent), Ghana (3.1 percent), and New Caledonia (2.4 percent).

“Our Q1 2008 data bears out what industry analysts have suspected for several months – Yahoo! and Google seem to be finally filtering out more of the click fraud and non-converting traffic they used to let through,” said Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics. “Removing some of these higher-profile abusers appears to be having an effect on lowering the click fraud rates. If advertisers, publishers and ad networks continue to take proactive steps to filter out this lower quality traffic, the click fraud rate could trend downward even further, and that's good news for the entire industry.”