Click Forensics, a monitoring firm measuring click fraud, is following (somewhat) in the footsteps of Fathom Online in creating its very own search advertising-related temperature gauge, the Click
Fraud Index. Of course, instead of measuring the average price of keywords, Click Forensics aims to tell marketers what percentage of the clicks they pay for are fraudulent. In March, when the company
started the service, the average was 14 percent, lower than the pessimists who worried that click fraud could be as high as 30-40 percent, but far higher than Google and Yahoo would have us believe.
That said, the fraud rate on so-called tier 1 services like Google and Yahoo was 12.1 percent, compared to the remaining two tiers, which were 21.3 and 29.8 percent respectively. Click Forensics
claims to have more than 400 advertisers using its monitoring service, from which it gleans data for the index. More than 90 percent of click fraud originated in the U.S. and Canada.
Read the whole story at Information Week »
