• EndlessPlain.com, Wednesday, August 27, 2008 1:15 PM

"Click Fraud has been a serious concern for careful marketers for a long time now," says Joy Brazelle. "But Click Fraud also has become a scape-goat for some poorly performing campaign symptoms caused by laziness or lack of knowledge."

For example, a high bounce rate/low average time on site could be attributed to click fraud, but it could also be a symptom of a mismatch between a highly descriptive ad and a generic or even irrelevant landing page. Meanwhile, low conversion rates could be symptoms of an overly complex or broken shopping cart.

Sometimes a high volume of traffic from the same IP can be seen as a sign of click fraud, but a simple WHOIS lookup could reveal that an ISP is kicking out multiple visitors from one address. Brazelle also touches on why advertisers just starting out may see what seems like excessively high CPCs, as well as incurring traffic from non-Google sites when they've clearly opted out of the content network.

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