At last! We too have been fighting for this for years.

Google may finally be realizing that if they are to maintain a high level of trust among their advertisers, they will need to come clean on the click fraud problem. Not only have the consistently understated the scope of problem, but they (until now) have made it very difficult to report, and nearly impossible to reconcile click logs with the data they report.

Hopefully this is a step toward not only a reporting API, but toward google and other ad networks opening up ALL of their data to advertisers, as opposed to the limited, summarized data that is available now.

Our research mirrors this articles claim of an average click fraud rate around 16% (although it can vary siginificantly from one campaign to another). Google's publically stated fraud rate is much lower, at around 2 to 3%, but based on their own definition, this only counts invalid traffic they managed detect and report.

We will soon be posting a white paper on our site www.trafficsentry.com with our recent findings on a new variation of an old click fraud scheme that seems to be undectable by any of the the search engines.

"Google has accused Click Forensics of being inept in its methodology and misleading in its results in order to make the problem seem bigger than it is. Meanwhile, Click Forensics has charged that Google has purposefully trivialized click fraud and mischaracterized it as a minor problem."

Who to believe? It's easy. Follow the money and figure out who has the most to lose (or gain). From what I can gather, it's hard to find an AdWords user who doesn't have some serious questions about the legitimacy of their clicks.

The irony is there are many a company that invests more in AdWords than they do in refining their site, biz model, customer service, product/service offerings, etc. All things they can control and can lead to higher quality customers (as referred by their current satisfied customers).

I for one would be curious to know how much Google spends on AdWords.

Mark Simchock
www.AlchemyUnited.com

I once paid for "traffic" to jumpstart a website, and visits by 100,000 unique IP addresses were in fact delivered, as seen in apache logs, but there was not a clickthrough sale. My page had mouse rollovers and these "visitors" never loaded the rollover images either!

It turned out to be a scam using a free bingo site, where my page appeared in pop-under windows.

Many such clever frauds were created to take advantage of NetPorn's pay-for-generating-clicks, which is the same as Google's adsense network.