• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, March 1, 2007

Some people might perceive click fraud as a major drawback to search advertising, but Google's Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for trust & safety, maintains the company has the situation under control.

In a post on the Inside AdWords blog, Ghosemajumder says Google doesn't charge advertisers for the overwhelming majority of clicks deemed invalid -- either due to out-and-out bad faith, or other factors, like users clicking twice in a row on the same link.

Ghosemajumder says Google investigates all clicks on its own and invalidates less than 10% before billing marketers. He adds that less than 0.02% of clicks are "reactively" invalidated -- meaning that Google decided not to charge marketers after they complained.

"Cases of provable click fraud attempts constitute a small minority of the clicks we mark as invalid," Ghosemajumder writes. "There are many greyer cases of possible click fraud attempts (but without clear scientific 'proof'), for which we still choose not to charge advertisers. For example, we have an automated rule which filters out the second click of all double clicks as a matter of policy."

Yet, despite Ghosemajumder's attempts to reassure the industry, some observers seem to perceive that click fraud is rampant. For one thing, unlike other types of scams, click fraud is remarkably simple; nearly everyone can understand how it happens. Additionally, some analytics companies have built a business out of detecting click fraud.

The blog post isn't the first time Google has attempted to present its side of the story. Last year, at a major industry conference, Google presented a report accusing monitoring companies of methodological errors that led them to overestimate click fraud.

Despite its stance that advertisers are almost never charged for bad clicks, Google is making concessions to marketers aimed at bolstering their confidence in search. The company reportedly will start letting advertisers block their paid search ads from being displayed to users at certain IP addresses, according to The Wall Street Journal. In other words, marketers will be able to say they don't want their ads even viewed by competitors.

Given that Google says it virtually never charges marketers for click fraud, the move appears entirely unnecessary. It seems Google's debuting a public relations effort aimed at increasing people's faith in search, rather than a new tool that will help advertisers get better results from pay-per-click campaigns.