Another Quarter, Another Jump in Click Fraud

Anchor Intelligence has released its report on Q1 2010 traffic quality and as expected, click fraud has increased yet again across the web.

Anchor is reporting a fraud rate of 29.2 percent for the first three months of this year, building on the 25.7 percent click fraud rate over the final quarter of 2009, and representing an almost 14 percent increase. That’s also a 34 percent increase in click fraud from the first quarter of 2009.

According to the report, the continued rise in click fraud is largely due to the dramatic growth of botnets in both scale and volume around the world and we’re inclined to agree. Click fraud rates have been rising steadily for as long as Ecommerce Junkie has been writing about it and it’s no coincidencethat botnets have become an increasingly larger menace over that time period as well.

The report from Anchor also includes data on traffic quality rates by country, with Vietnam (35.4 percent), Australia (35.2 percent) and the U.S. (35 percent) rounding out the top three for highest rates of click fraud among 30 countries across the globe. Again, botnets and click-fraud rings are likely the biggest cause of fraudulent traffic in these countries. The United Kingdom has been hit especially hard by botnet activity over the last six months, with click fraud rates rising to 32 percent there this quarter after only 18 percent in Q4 2009.

“As Internet usage has grown in countries lacking appropriate cybersecurity measures, more and more computers have become infected with malware and used as click fraud zombies,” said Ken Miller, CEO of Anchor Intelligence. “Through this report, we hope to convey the importance of advertising with ad networks and search engines that partner with third-parties such as Anchor to certify their traffic quality.”

Admittedly, it has been a rough few months for cyber security overall, which probably also explains the continued rise in fraud. There have been recent reports from McAfee and Google on a rise in cyber attacks against blogs in Vietnam that were critical of certain mining efforts. And of course, we had more than thirty companies (including Google) who were victims of cyber security breaches originating out of China back in December and January.

Despite the fact that the U.S. economy is beginning to rebound, businesses continue to tread cautiously when it comes to their online advertising operations and click fraud is a big reason why. We’ve heard instances of advertisers being charged extra for multiple clicks from the same web user in certain cases, which is just one example of how damaging and unfair the wrong kind of advertising activity can be to retailers and other web marketers. As always, we strongly recommend that you do your research before embarking on an online advertising campaign. Once you have a campaign going, we also suggest parsing the clicks and data from your traffic server logs yourself instead of relying on the third parties you’re advertising with who may offer tracking software or tools as part of their packages.

We’ll keep tabs on click fraud data and cyber security news as it arises. Leave us your thoughts and comments below.