Click fraud - better and worse than they say

John Battelle is right- "maybe the truth is, stories about click fraud won't go away."

There's definitely a lot of click fraud out there. Our tests suggest it might even be higher than the 20-35% range mentioned in most news articles - but that's for total clicks, not clicks billed! The real victims of click fraud seem to be the analytics companies and the people who rely on their data - which often has very little connection with the reality of what the networks charge.

I'd love to see a reporter dig into the 20-35% numbers. We've seen nearly 500% more clicks in some cases than show up on our search bill. We also consistently see high enough conversion rates on big ticket items that it's incredibly unlikely 35% of the clicks billed were fraudulent.

Related Tags: click fraud, search engine marketing, sem