Click Fraud Article

John Marshall and Eric Enge Talk About Click Fraud

Clicktracks is well known as a significant player in the analytics space, and is in particular well known for the click fraud analysis tools that they provide to their clients as part of that package. Recently the Clicktracks CEO, John Marshall, and I spoke about click fraud in a podcast we did together.

John provides an excellent overview of what click fraud really is, how pervasive it is, and what the search engines are doing about it. For example, John outlines that click fraud affects sites in a very random manner, where some sites are hit very hard by it, and others not at all. John also indicates that the problem is much worse in very competitive markets.

When I asked John if the search engines were doing enough to combat click fraud, he provided an answer that will surprise most people (the answer was "yes"). John is not minimizing click fraud when he says this. He is simply saying that it is incumbent on the advertiser to play an active role in combatting click fraud as well.

Click fraud does exist and you have to monitor your pay per click campaigns and pay attention, otherwise your going to wind up paying a lot more in the long run. 

The better investment for the long run is to make sure your website is setup to be well ranked in the organic listings. No need to worry about click fraud then!

SOURCE: Search Engine Watch