Click Forensics®, Inc. recently released advertising audience quality figures for the second quarter 2010 from the industry’s leading independent online advertising data reporting service. Now in its fourth year, the Click Forensics reporting service provides statistically significant data collected from Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising campaigns for both large and small advertisers across all leading search engines as well as comparison shopping engines and social networks. Traffic across more than 300 ad networks is reflected in the data. Key findings for Q2 2010 include:

• The overall industry average click fraud rate was 18.6 percent. That’s up from the 17.4 percent reported for Q1 2010 and the 12.7 percent rate reported for Q2 2009.
• In Q2 2010, the countries outside North America with significant CPC traffic producing the greatest volume of click fraud were Singapore, Pakistan, Japan, Ukraine and China respectively.

“Over the past several quarters, we’ve seen the overall click fraud rate slowly trending higher,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The main reasons appear to be the continued sophistication of botnets and malware prevalent in the fast-growing search marketing space. We advise online marketers to be watchful of their campaigns as they spend more on search advertising in the coming quarters.”

Since 2006, Click Forensics has published online advertising industry data collected from the first independent third-party Cost Per Click (CPC) and online advertising fraud detection service. The service monitors online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, comparison shopping engines, social networks, leading publishers and advertiser web sites – providing the most accurate view of online advertising audience quality.