Click fraud: advertisers to watch closely in 2009

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 30 November 2008 08:06

Business IT - Networking

Adotas.com, a site for media buyers online, has published an article called “Click Fraud to shape ad decisions in 2009”, by Ken Miller.

For some reason, the site is currently down, but the magic of the Google Cache makes the recent article still available to read.
   
Here Miller states that “we are in the midst of a transition in online advertising that may not be fully appreciated for another year. As financial fears and uncertainty pervade Wall Street, and once-high-flying Internet darlings struggle to stay relevant, there is an underground revolution among marketers that will permanently change how ad spend decisions get made.”

Advertisers are facing “reduced budgets” and are “looking for the biggest bang for their advertising buck”, and are “increasingly intolerant of low-performing and hard-to-measure ad campaigns.”

While Miller says that “online advertising is expected to be fairly resilient in the coming year”, he also notes “that resiliency will be matched with intense scrutiny as marketers seek to maximize ROI to the fullest possible extent. As a result, marketers are expressing a renewed interest in the subject of click fraud (a.k.a. unwanted traffic) and how it is distorting their ad campaign’s performance.”

Similar to the Wikipedia definition of click fraud on the previous page, Miller determines click fraud as “clicks or impressions that have no economic value to the advertiser due to malicious intent on the part of the clicker. A click may be fraudulent when the clicker has no intention of converting, giving the advertiser no chance to reap a return on their investment in that click.”

He also notes that: “Click fraud is already a concern among search marketers. In fact, 76% of advertisers believe that at least 5% of online advertising activity is fraudulent, according to June 2008 Canaccord Adam’s Online Ad Survey.”

Botnets are also driving click fraud growth, with “the number of PCs ensnared in botnets... has more than quadrupled”.

Miller again states that as advertisers “become increasingly concerned with click fraud in 2009”, it could “adversely affect online advertising growth much the way ID theft affected online commerce in the early days of the Internet.”

Ad networks will, Miller says, be “aggressively filtering out bad traffic and instilling a sense of confidence among advertisers during this time of economic uncertainty, secure ad networks are finding they can draw new advertising dollars their way.”

He concludes: “The revolution is underway, and it is incumbent upon all of us to ensure the online ad industry matures and reaches its potential of becoming the largest ad-spend medium in the world.”

For much more detail please read Miller’s original article, here on the Google Cache or at the original article when the Adotas.com site comes back from being temporarily offline.