July 10, 2006 | Monday

Latest research on click fraud

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in News |Search Engines |Search Expertise |Click Fraud

The San Francisco Chronicle article on click fraud, which quotes a study saying that advertisers lost $800 million to click fraud last year, is attracting some attention in the search curve of the blogosphere. Danny Sullivan has now contributed his analysis of the research report, with several important points worth considering when talking about click fraud. For instance:

The report also reports on the rate people ask for refunds—5.4 percent have asked Google; 2.9 percent asked Yahoo and MSN comes next at 1.5 percent. The vast majority of advertisers—92.9 percent—haven’t ask for refunds. The report notes this big discrepancy between those who say they’ve cut budgets because of click fraud (27 percent) or those who have estimated click fraud to be 14.6 percent of spend. It’s an important point, because if this much money really is believed to be fraudulently billed by advertisers, why aren’t they pushing in larger numbers for repayment? And how come half of them report they do no systematic analysis of click logs. How can estimates of click fraud from this half even be included to make an industry stat, if they’ve done no analysis of their own?

Latitude COO Richard Gregory offered his own view of certain journalistic takes on click fraud back in January, in a blog post entitled Click fraud: Get vigilant and get real.