Sure, advertisers on any of the content networks are clearly in danger from click-fraud. There the incentive is clear: publishers get paid when ads are clicked.

Even the search network is a dangerous place to advertise because your ad can end up on parked domains - another place a publisher has incentive to click the ad.

With ads on the search engines, though, there is very little incentive for click fraud. Will a competitor try to run out your budget - maybe, but this I have to believe is rare.

wellletzc - Were your ads on a content network or just on the search engines? If on the search engines, how did you identify it as click fraud?

The lesson: stay away from content and search networks - they provide poor traffic and open you up to click fraud.

Sure, advertisers on any of the content networks are clearly in danger from click-fraud. There the incentive is clear: publishers get paid when ads are clicked.

Even the search network is a dangerous place to advertise because your ad can end up on parked domains - another place a publisher has incentive to click the ad.

With ads on the search engines, though, there is very little incentive for click fraud. Will a competitor try to run out your budget - maybe, but this I have to believe is rare.

wellletzc - Were your ads on a content network or just on the search engines? If on the search engines, how did you identify it as click fraud?

The lesson: stay away from content and search networks - they provide poor traffic and open you up to click fraud.

The apparently random and normal distribution of the traffic is what caught our eye. Though we advertise nationally, our products only appeals to certain limited geographical profiles, and the browser platforms are very heavily Apple/Mac and our organic traffic reflected this. The PPC traffic did not.

Also, ClickForensics did NOT identify this traffic as click fraud.

We finally stopped using PPC advertising in February, saved several thousand per month, our visitor numbers dropped a lot. Yet, our online sales increased at about the same rate as when we were using PPC advertising.

If a third party had not problem singling out every fraud click, it would be even easier for Google and Yahoo to do so.

The point is, the report makers don’t know what is a fraudulent click and what is not, period.

What is more important, however, is that Google algorithms already discount the value of clicks that fit certain profiles through their smart pricing software, in cases making the clicks worth zero to publishers.

Thus, Google takes care of clicks with certain profiles, which has the aim of making the profit from fraudulent clicks to as close to zero as possible.

In addition, Google will stop showing ads with publishers that have certain click profiles.

That is a background that should be understood when reading these reports.

Reporting that there are indications of x % of click fraud but leaving the background out is lazy.

Jon
http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories

Here is the situation:

I post article online, that same article is RSS feeded by FaceBook or MySpace. Friend’s of mine click on that article and let say click on google adsense advertising.

NEXT time I go to my friends house using his internet I login to Adsense or Gmail or any google app. Google would flag me as “bad boy”

It happens! yet did not happen to me yet/

No. Only very basic cheating systems can be caught like that I’ve been in PPC for about 5 years (not promoting and not cheating :-)). Trust me, there are so many ways to cheat.