Google PPC: “Not 2% Fraud”
Google corrects some misinformation, which I, and many others in the SEM community, were pretty skeptical about yesterday:
“I never said that our click fraud rate is less than 2%. Instead, what I said is that the quantity of invalid clicks which we detect as a result of reactive investigations is a “negligible proportion†of the total number of invalid clicks…. So what is our overall “click fraud rateâ€? As noted in the diagram in the story, it is virtually impossible to know the intent of every click. However, we can do a very effective job using statistical techniques to detect potentially malicious behavior, and the total number of invalid clicks we detect – whether for suspected malicious or non-malicious intent – is in the single digit percentages. So third-party estimates which say that click fraud is 15% or higher appear to clearly be substantial exaggerations.“
