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Anchor Intelligence: Click Fraudsters Still Running Rampant

Written on: Jul 6, 2010
Author: Gavin Dunaway |
: Share; Anchor Intelligence: Click Fraudsters Still Running Rampant

ADOTAS – It may be popular for those in the industry to spout that the “Wild West” days of Internet advertising are over, but Anchor Intelligence is seeing as much attempted click fraud as ever. Although it slightly decreased quarter-over-quarter, the company noted in its second quarter “Traffic Quality Report” that attempted click fraud was at 28.9%, 26% higher over the same quarter last year.

The report measured traffic quality across Anchor’s search engine, ad network and advertiser clients from April through June and labeled clicks as valid or invalid. Although the invalid rate dipped from 36.1% in the first quarter to 29.8%, this was primarily due to significant drop in the “innocuous” invalid (for example, a consumer accidentally double-clicking on an ad) from 7% to less than 1% in the second quarter. Attempted click fraud, however, only slid from 29.2% to 28.9%.

Anchor cited less robot traffic from indexing website spiders and test clicks by networks and search engines for the fall in innocuous traffic, and noted that such traffic is regularly prefiltered by ad providers and does not affect ad spend.

According to its Anchor’s analysis, fraudsters seem to be circling around the smaller fish. Anchor customers with more than 1 million daily clicks consistently reported higher volumes and lower attempted click fraud, leading Anchor to believe more successful and better protected ad networks and search engines are receiving less attention from fraudsters. Instead they have their sites on less established and more vulnerable depots.

“Click fraud attempts are not going to go away any time soon,” said Anchor Intelligence CEO Ken Miller. “Cybercriminals will simply reallocate their attempts from well protected ad networks and search engines to those that do not have a fortified line of defense.”

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Tags: Anchor-Intelligence, click-fraud, display, network, search and security

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