'Net Features : click forensics

Click Fraud Drops But New Malware Scheme Surfaces

Linc Wonham — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:00:00 GMT

The click fraud rate dropped in the fourth quarter of 2010 for the first time since the middle of 2009, according to a new report from Click Forensics.

The rate dipped from 22.3 percent in Q3 2010 to 19.1 percent in Q4, ending a string of five straight quarterly increases that began with the rate at 14.1 percent midway through 2009. Click Forensics uses traffic from more than 300 advertising networks to produce the data.

The news was not all favorable, however, as seen in some of the report's highlights below:

• While the fourth quarter’s overall industry average click fraud rate of 19.1 percent was lower than the reported rate for Q3 2010, it was higher than the 15.3 rate reported for Q4 2009.

• The Click Forensics Malware Lab identified a new malware scheme targeting display banner ads. The sophisticated program performs a pop-up or pop-under and rotates brand advertisers’ banner ads every 10 to 15 minutes in an effort to seemingly boost impression figures. Click Forensics researchers are working diligently to quantify the impact of this new scheme.

• In Q4 2010, the countries outside North America producing the greatest volume of click fraud were Japan, The Netherlands, Philippines, Sweden and France, respectively.

“While the overall click fraud rate dropped last quarter for CPC advertising, we saw the emergence of new schemes focused on display advertisements,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “We are investigating the malware-driven attacks in more detail, but early evidence points to an impression inflation scheme. It’s something we will examine more closely and report on later this year.”

To see the entire report, visit Click Fraud Index.

Click Fraud Climbing; Social ‘Nets Partially Immune

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 20:00:00 GMT

The overall click fraud rate is slowly trending higher over the past several quarters according to Click Forensics.

The overall industry average click fraud rate was 18.6 percent. That’s up from the 17.4 percent reported for Q1 2010 and the 12.7 percent rate reported for Q2 2009. In Q2 2010, the countries outside North America with significant CPC traffic producing the greatest volume of click fraud were Singapore, Pakistan, Japan, Ukraine and China respectively.

“Over the past several quarters, we’ve seen the overall click fraud rate slowly trending higher,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The main reasons appear to be the continued sophistication of botnets and malware prevalent in the fast-growing search marketing space. We advise online marketers to be watchful of their campaigns as they spend more on search advertising in the coming quarters.”

It’s not all bad news however. Click Forensics study of campaigns from a cross-section of advertisers and third-party ad networks showed traffic from leading social networking sites, including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to have an average overall click fraud rate of 11.5 percent, significantly lower than the industry average.

The takeaway from the study might just be that advertising on social networks will lessen the chance of click fraud on your campaigns. While one could probably attribute that to the still relatively low adoption rate of advertising on these destinations, it might also be related to the fact that social networks don't have the affiliate marketers profiting from elicit clicks.

Ad Serving Based On Audience Quality

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:22:00 GMT

Traffic quality and online advertising verification service Click Forensics will announce some interesting new functionality in its platform today at Ad:Tech in San Francisco. The upgraded platform will enable ad networks and content publishers to make real-time ad serving decisions based on the quality of a search query or impression.

The new Search Quality Score feature instantly scores each search query based on its quality and likelihood to convert so that real-time ad serving decisions can be made. Ad networks and publishers can use visitor quality in determining which search feed to query – dictating the results that should appear and the ads to be displayed. This helps clients to better monetize traffic, increase Click Through Rates (CTRs), improve feed management, and maximize profits.

“The quality of an ad impression can vary greatly and change over time,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “If ad networks and publishers are to be successful in maximizing profits, they need to be able to make instant decisions based on impression quality, even for CPC ads. Our new offering is designed to do just that, while improving relationships with downstream partners.”

Blame It on the Botnets; Click Fraud Figures, Q3 2009

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:45:00 GMT

Click Forensics today released click fraud figures today for the third quarter, and while the overall rate increase to 14.1 percent in the third quarter of this year (up from 12.7 percent for Q2 2009), it remains lower than the 16.0 percent rate the company reported for the same period last year.

So who or what is causing all the click fraud? You can blame it on the botnets – group of infected PCs that are controlled by malicious software. Click Forensics, an audience verification and traffic quality vendor, said that botnets accounted for 42.6 percent of all click fraud in the quarter, more than doubling in the past two years and up from the 27.5 percent reported for the same quarter last year.

“The significant rise in botnet-generated click fraud lines up with recent findings of several well-known malware and online fraud tracking experts,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “Botnets perpetrating click fraud and other online schemes continue to grow in number and sophistication. Advertisers and ad providers need to be especially vigilant about such activity as we enter the competitive search marketing holiday season.”

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Click Fraud Surge From Bahama Botnet

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:20:00 GMT

ClickForensics just announced that it has identified a large spike in click fraud traffic coming from a new botnet that appears to be eluding the filters of even the most sophisticated search engines, publishers and ad networks.

The real danger here is that the malware distributed botnet (codenamed "Bahama botnet" by Click Forensics) is masking itself as a legitimate high-quality source of search advertising traffic. In some instances, attacks have affected up to 30 percent of an advertisers monthly budget on specific campaigns.

From the release: "The Bahama botnet commits click fraud in a number of different ways. It can generate paid clicks by using normal user behavior to transform an organic search into a paid click. It can also leverage the network of bot-infected machines to programmatically auto-generate paid clicks without any human interaction. The dual nature of this botnet makes it a more powerful vehicle for committing click fraud than other kinds of click fraud botnets."

What will makes this so frightening for advertisers is that the botnet operates intermittently so users don't know anything is wrong, does so independently and is coming from many different IP's making it difficult to find and identify which clicks are indeed fraudulent. ClickForensics did catch these auto-generated clicks through anomaly detection programs.

The botnet appears to be related to the recent scareware attacks such as those perpetrated again the NY Times site this week. A pop-up greeted users when arriving at the site, informing them their computer was infected and directed to a site where they could install an Antivirus program (which was infected with a Trojan).

“During the past four years we’ve monitored billions of clicks for top search engines, ad networks, publishers and advertisers. This scheme is one of the most sophisticated we’ve seen,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “The botnet is effectively disguising the fraud it produces as ‘good traffic’ by altering the interval and breadth of the attacks across legions of infected machines.”

Click Fraud; Down, But Not Out

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:40:00 GMT

Anchor Intelligence last week released its first report detailing traffic quality across its network of search engines, ad networks, publishers, and advertisers. The verdict? Click fraud is down (albeit only slightly).

Based on Anchor’s analysis of data from customers, the average invalid rate for Anchor customers fell slightly from 27.9% in Q1 to 27.1% in Q2. The Q1 invalid rate was comprised of a 21.7% average attempted click fraud rate and a 6.2% other invalid rate. In Q2, the average attempted click fraud rate increased to 22.9% and the other invalid rate declined to 4.2%.

In addition to the network-level rates, Anchor Intelligence also reported traffic quality rates for the top 30 countries by traffic volume. The countries with the highest attempted click fraud rates were Vietnam (48.3%), Canada (27.7%), and the U.S. (25.6%). Many lower volume countries experienced much higher attempted click fraud rates.

The Traffic Quality Report from Anchor can be accessed here.

Do these numbers seem a little out of place? The Anchor report is akin to saying that one out of five clicks is fraudulent. That's pretty shocking and I'm probably more cynical than your average PPC marketer. Click Forensics also released data on 2nd quarter PPC fraud figures (citing it as 12.7%) and it’s down for the quarter and the year across their network too. Click fraud remains a threat to every online advertiser but it remains difficult to measure - perhaps the reason for the discrepancy.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were some standards in measuring click fraud?
Share your comments below.

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Click-fraud Declines in Q1 2009

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:24:00 GMT

Click Forensics released PPC fraud figures from the first quarter 2009 last week. There is good news for PPC advertisers.

The overall industry average click fraud rate was 13.8 percent for Q1 2009. That’s down from 17.1 percent reported for Q4 2008 and from the 16.3 percent rate reported for Q1 2008. In Q1 2009, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside the U.S. came from Canada, United Kingdom and Germany. Tom Cuthbert, president of ClickForensics, attributes the drop to the decrease in keyword CPCs and the progress Yahoo! and Google have made blocking click fraud from botnet sources.

“It appears that the drop in keyword Cost Per Clicks (CPCs) and the progress Yahoo! and Google made blocking click fraud from botnet sources contributed to the decline in the overall click fraud rate this quarter,” said Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics. “However, we also saw an increase in scripted attacks aimed at ad networks, which are historically more vulnerable to such threats. Advertisers should pay close attention to traffic from these sources over the next year.”

Current Click Fraud Rates

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:15:00 GMT

Click fraud reporting service Click Forensics released its industry pay-per-click fraud figures. The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.0 percent in the third quarter of 2008, down from the 16.2 percent rate reported for both Q2 2008 and Q3 2007.

Other key findings from the report include:

- Average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks (e.g. Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network) was 27.1 percent, 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 - 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).

Click Fraud Holding Steady

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:09:00 GMT

Click Forensics released industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures for the second quarter 2008. Key findings from data reported for Q2 2008 include:

The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.2 percent for Q2 2008. That's down slightly from the 16.3 percent rate reported for Q1 2008 and up from the 15.8 percent click fraud rate reported for Q2 2007.
The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 27.6 percent. That's down from the 27.8 percent rate reported for Q1 2008 and up from the 25.6 percent average click fraud rate reported for Q1 2007.
For the first time, traffic from botnets was responsible for more than 25 percent of all click fraud traffic in Q2 2008.
In Q2 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from China (4.3 percent), Russia (3.5 percent), and France (3.2 percent).

Now in its third year, the Click Fraud Index monitors and reports on data gathered from the Click Fraud Network™, which more than 4,000 online advertisers and agencies have joined. The Click Fraud Network provides statistically significant industry PPC data collected from online advertising campaigns for both large and small companies across all the leading search engines.