Hey Chris,

I feel honored that you did another vlog just based on my previous response. :)

In this video, you actually do bring up a interesting points that support (although you may feel that my opinion is somewhat biased due to the nature of the company that I work in).

You mentioned that:

1) Fraudulent/invalid clicks does bring up the cost of PPC up

2) From that, I think it's fair to infer that the average advertiser can be affected by it (not necessarily just those that pay $15+/click), although the amount that they are affected by is proportionate to their spending. However, wouldn't $500 to somebody spending $5,000/mo matter as much as $5,000 to somebody spending $50,000?

3) It is up to the advertiser to monitor the activity and ensure that they are billed accordingly. I agree completely. I do think that the ultimate burden of tracking the campaign falls on the advertiser. And click fraud is not the sole metric they should focus on, but rather should consider it as one of many elements of their campaign (conversion rates, etc. being others). In fact, with our clients, we constantly tell them that detecting and preventing click fraud is important, but tracking and improving the conversion rates is absolutely crucial.

The only problem that I see with this is that not every advertiser has the manpower or the expertise to go through their log files looking for suspicious activity (and I think it's fair to state that Google doesn't offer that much information about the clicks they process and bill for). After all, you also need to know what to look for and how to do it. For many advertisers, they don't necessarily know how or have the time to actually do it. But does all of that necessarily mean that click fraud doesn't exist or it's not an issue?

Boris

Boris,
With comments that length, you should probably be blogging your responses on your own blog. But I appreciate them nonetheless :)

You know, I'd have to dig up the sources (and I don't have time right now), but I recall reading that that commonly quote 10% clickfraud number is actually just invalid clicks. Bona fide fraudulent clicks make up only a fraction of that 10%.

If this is the case, it tells me two things: (1) click fraud truly isn't a problem; and (2) there is a considerable market for PPC campaign monitoring solutions for those who (as you pointed out) don't have the time, expertise, and/or manpower to go through their own log files.

I guess if you think about it, then, the majority of click fraud consists in inefficient or dishonest adservers who are unable to filter out invalid clicks.