Industry Click Fraud Rate Hovers at 16 Percent for Third Quarter 2008

Click Fraud Traffic from Botnets Rises 10 Percent; Botnets Grow to Make Up More than 27 Percent of All Click Fraud

Click Forensics, Inc. today released industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures for the third quarter 2008 from the search advertising industry’s leading independent click fraud reporting service – the Click Fraud Index.

Key findings from data reported for Q3 2008 include:

• The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.0 percent for Q3 2008. That’s down slightly from the 16.2 percent rate reported for both Q2 2008 and Q3 2007.
  
• The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 27.1 percent. That’s down from the 27.6 percent rate reported for Q2 2008 and the 28.1 percent average click fraud rate reported for Q3 2007.
  
• Traffic from botnets was responsible for 27.6 percent of all click fraud traffic in Q3 2008. That’s up from 25.2 percent for Q2 2008.
  
• In Q3 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from Russia (4.9 percent), France (4.8 percent) and the U.K. (3.5 percent).