Click Forensics

I was thinking on Click Fraud and how advertisers can protect themselves from malicious clicks (orquestrated by "pirate" looking individuals :) ) on PPC ads and found Click Forensics a company which provides services to monitor ad campaigns for click fraud. Basically they offer traffic quality management, which comprises all efforts to improve the return on online advertising.

They achieve this through a Traffic Quality Engine. The engine analyzes PPC traffic data with sophisticated heuristics to score the relative merits of online traffic. Data mining techniques are applied to click behavior to identify markers and determine relative merit of every click, every visitor, and every site. The large number of heuristics employed examine three main categories of data:

• Attributes: technical and economic attributes of every click include IP address, proxy server traffic, bot characteristics, originating location, HTTP header characteristics, visitor profile characteristics and cost-per-click.
  


• Behavioral: click-through behavior such as visit depth, time on site, viewing patterns, and time between clicks.
  


• Community: comparative data is available across a community of advertisers, networks, and publishers for correlation, validation, and continuous improvement to the algorithms.

(For more information on this you can visit http://www.clickforensics.com/)

Looking through information on click fraud I found that it rose to 17.1 percent, up from 16 percent in the third quarter of 2008 and from 16.6 percent in 2007's fourth quarter, according to Click Forensics' quarterly report. According to the report Click Fraud spikes during the holiday shopping season but the results for 2008 4th Quarter were an all time high. A big factor in the fourth quarter's increase was the continued rise in the use of botnets. In the fourth quarter, botnets generated 31.4 percent of click fraud traffic, up from 27.6 percent in the third quarter and from 22 percent in 2007's fourth quarter. Another factor boosting click fraud is the global economic crisis, which has caused a spike in crime and cybercrime of all sorts.

Industry Click Fraud Rate Higher Than Ever Reaching 17.1% in Q4 2008 on Click Forensics

(http://www.clickforensics.com/newsroom/press-releases/120-click-fraud-index.html)

The increase in Click Fraud is alarming and it is a pity that besides investing on online advertising you have to pay to get protected from click fraud in order to guarantee higher results from your investment. Unfortunately although this seems like a good solution people who actually work on employing click fraud tactics will continuously find new ways of doing so. While I was searching for information on click fraud I actually got some ads on where to obtain click fraud which is definitely a concern!!