Beware! Botnets Master Click Fraud!
In the second quarter the average click fraud rate on search engine content networks was 25.6% which means that more than a quarter of clicks for contextual ads were fraudulent. The industry as a whole suffered an increase of 1%, claiming a 16% average click fraud rate.
Industry insiders gossip that this may cause advertiser to be more cautious when considering contextual ads, claiming many will turn to alternatives.
Click Fraud Index report showed that Q2 traffic from botnets doubled from Q1. President and CEP of Click Forensics, Tom Cuthbert stated, “Advertisers running campaigns on content networks are especially vulnerable as they are increasingly targeted by a growing pool of fraudsters, from botnets [groups of compromised computers that can be used to commit crimes like spamming and identity theft] to publishers and individual site owners that have created made-for-ad sites.”
FBI officials have been cracking down on botnet rings. They have reported over 1 million US computers to have been hijacked by bots. Both Yahoo and Google are making changes to try to help their advertisers feel safe against the threat of click fraud.
Despite Google’s launch of AdWords and changing of Quality Score; as well as Yahoo’s “openness” policy with its advertisers and their control over Panama and the appointing of Reggie Davis to vice president of marketplace quality; many critics agree that not enough is being done to prevent revenue losses from fraudulent clicks.
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