Click Fraud Increasing

If you have been reading our blog you can easily see that we are not big fans of Pay Per Click advertising.  We rarely write about PPC, and in general we don’t recommend it to our clients, other than to supplement a Search Engine Optimization campaign.  It’s not that we don’t believe it has value in some situations, but our philosophy is that Paid Search Campaigns can be a good supplement to a Search Engine Optimization, especially in the early stages, but over the long term it is not as effective or efficient as a good Search Engine Optimization campaign.

This report by Click Forensics outlines the increase in Paid Search Click Fraud, and shows that the instances of click fraud are increasingly performed by Automated Bots.   In summary, 17.1% of all clickthroughs on paid search advertising are fraudulent, an increase from 16.3% in 2008.

More disturbing is the fact that 30% of all click fraud is being done by automated bots, which leads us to believe that the trend will only continue.   To read the rest of the article, follow this link here – http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/27/report-click-fraud-at-record-high/

-Chris