Hey Chris,

Very interesting video, indeed.

I hope you don't mind, but I just wanted to share a few of my own thoughts and experiences regarding the issue. However, in order to put all cards on the table, I do feel it's necessary to let you know that I actually operate a click fraud detection and prevention service - www.adwatcher.com. Just so that there would be full disclosure.

First of all, in terms of your comments that if a legitimate visitor clicks on your ad and leaves within a few moments because he doesn't find what he/she was looking for, I absolutely agree with you that it certainly doesn't constitute click fraud. Rather, it's a poor job done by the advertiser to attract the right type of visitor due to bad ad text and/or a poor job of keeping the visitor on the site due to a bad landing page. The search engine did its job of delivering the visitor, the visitor has some intention to research or buy the product or service, and as far as I'm concerned, nothing fraudulent occurs in this situation.

However, in regards to the actual fraudulent clicks - committed by the publishers or advertisers - I have to respectfully disagree.

Don't get me wrong, I don't believe that click fraud threatens the industry nor do I go around saying that it can reach 30%+ of an advertiser's ad spend. In fact, I'll even go out on a limb and will say that unless you run your campaign on very slim profit margins, click fraud will not make or break your campaign. The actual success of your conversions will depend primarily on how good of a job you do in terms of designing your ads, landing pages, etc.

But can click fraud affect 5%, 10%, 15% of the overall ad spend? Absolutely - and I see it every day among our own clients. And while that's not a huge amount for most and many consider it a cost of doing business, I believe that it makes sense to try and recover as much as the lost money as possible - even if it's just $500/mo out of a $5,000/mo campaign.

In terms of you stating that click fraud is miniscule, well - you said it yourself that it's just a speculation. Somebody else can just as easily go out and say that it's 30%. But even if you speak from your personal experience, it's based on a very limited data.

The fact of the matter is that it is different for every advertiser which is why I'd be cautious of any estimates. However, it doesn't only affect those advertisers that spend $15+ per click. Nor does it only affect some industries and not the others.

Just my $0.02c.

Boris Mordkovich
www.adwatcher.com

Boris,
Thanks for you comments. I really appreciate when someone takes the time to leave something that fully articulates their position.

You have a point about click fraud being very different for every advertiser. I guess what I was getting at, though, is that between your adservers own mechanism, and policing your CTR, I think that click fraud can be cut down to a pretty small rate. If anything, it's really just made a PPC campaign more challenging to run because (1) you have to set it up in a way that you can easily police the CTR and other stats, and (2) you have to actually take the time to do that policing.

Long story short, click fraud has increased the cost of doing business as far PPC advertising is concerned, but those costs needn't be extraneous. Really, all it should cost you is the few extra man-hours a week it takes to (1) set up the campaign properly, and (2) monitor your CTR and conversions.

I guess what I'm getting at is that click fraud has simply made PPC advertising less user friendly.