2nd Quarter Click Fraud dipped slightly from record levels in the first quarter of 2010 accoring to an Anchor Intelligence report cited by a blog post at Search Engine Land. According to the article, click fraud remains high due to automated bots, as well as the exploitation of security vulneratbilities. While click fraud dipped slightly (from 29.2% to 28.9%) - it still remains much higher than it was last year. And attempted click fraud in the United States leads all nations at over 34%.
Click Fraud can inflate an advertiser's advertising budget by forcing them to pay for what are essentially invalid clicks. This can affect advertisers who are advertising on both the search and the content networks. Google AdWords has tools in place to try to prevent invalid clicks and automatically prevent advertisers from being charged for clicks which Google deems to be invalid. Back in May, I provided a detailedclick fraud overview.
How Does This Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?
Most Denver small businesses should seriously explore advertising online - in spite of the risk of click fraud. Google does have measures in place to protect advertisers, but you can't completely rely on the advertising platform to protect you. As the advertiser, you need to monitor the clicks yourself - or hire someone to monitor your campaign for you - to ensure that no suspcious activity is occurring with your account. According to the research study, 1/3 of clicks are fraudulent - this of cousre means that you could be wasting 33% (or more) of your advertising budget on fraudulent clicks.
If you do detect click fraud, there are a number of actions that you can take. If you're using placement targeting and notice that you're experiencing what appear to be fraudulent clicks, either stop targeting that website with your ads or appeal to Google. Likewise, if you're advertising on the search or display network, monitor clicks and report any suspicious activity to Google so that your advertising budget doesn't get decimated.