Current Click Fraud Rates

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).