Rsnake has an article about click fraud where he noted that “we were seeing numbers in the 10-20% range of fraud” for unprotected systems. His conclusion goes even further to say that “click fraud prevention is just too flawed.”
However, I don’t quite agree with his analysis about banner ads:
First of all, let me get my rant out of the way. Banner advertizing (not text based, just the images) is highly flawed. The advertizers will ask you to create a banner that his highly attractive to consumers (like hit the monkey) the problem with that is that they create a huge amount of clickthroughs which is great for the banner advertizing companies, but it’s terrible for the advertizers because they don’t make any money off of it. Unqualified leads aren’t worth anything. It is really in your best interest to make the most ugly banner possible, that no one would ever want to click on unless they knew for a fact that money would immediately be withdrawn from their account.
That may be true for PPC banners, but many banner slots are sold on a CPM or monthly basis. In those instances, it can often make sense to shell out the cash for a banner spot. The most important thing with any kind of online advertising is to track the success of a campaign to solid ROI numbers. Even with the flaws in PPC and banner ads, you can often tell very quickly whether or not a particular advertising rout is going to be profitable. As the CFO of Google pointed out, the market should be able to adapt and price fraud into their ROI numbers.
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[…] * SEO BlackHat shoots down a post on click fraud from Rsnake when he disses banner ads. I’m in agreement and I am always eagerly waiting for posts from QuadsZilla. […]