Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

An excellent article on Marketing Pilgrim :

Exclusive : Google’s Click Fraud Rate is Less than 2%

Where Google’s business product manager for trust and safety, Shuman Ghosemajumder, interviewed by Andy Beal explain the filtering process.

According to him, the click fraud rate is less than 2%.

 

And we should really trust them beucase they say sooo yeah RIGHT!

 

Just link bait.

Drill down into the story, the comments and responses to the comments and you'll see that claim is empty and unproven.

Sorry, but those are the facts.

 

Sounds like sh1te to me...how is Google really to know how much click fraud they didn’t detect?

I see how they are 'trying' to assess a estimated figure. But in reality, its just guesswork.

They don't know, thats kinda the point..

 

As long as an advertiser gets Reasonable conversions, This will never be a major issue., Seeing the growth of publisher network and decline in conversions , This may reach a bubble burst stage soon, if google does not take effective measures

 

Smart pricing policy ... tells me that's not even close (2%) I just think they stoped some of it ..but it is still the wild wild west out there.

 

I spend 1000 $ a month with google adword and all i get is a stupid letter telling me thay are looking into my claim and then 2 days after they found nothing.

 

I listened to a really interesting interview with Clarence Briggs, CEO of hosting firm AIT.com on Webmaster Radio this morning. He claims that up to 70% of his pay per click costs with Google in the past has been click fraud.

I suppose it depends on who you speak to.

 

Difficult to tell what is the truth...
Shuman Ghosemajumder write about it on his blog, trying to explain what he said, and what Andy Beal said :

http://shumans.com/articles/000044.php

 

Oddly enough the topic of click fraud started some active comment writing on a post on Matt Cutts blog several days ago (I was one).

I say odd because he just wrote about the Shuman Ghosemajumder interview which started this thread again with no mention of the comments in the Andy Beal piece which added balance and much better perspective than the misleading headline of the Beal post.

 

The Marketing Pilgrim article originally didn't state things 100% accurately.

The figure of less than 2% is for Google detected invalid clicks

They go on to deduce that fraudulent clicks that do not get detected must be a fraction of this - less than .5% probably - but this is an assumption.

I don't think fraudulent clicks are anything like as high as 70%, or even the 20-30% that third party click fraud tracking software companies state. We have in-house tracking systems and are seeing less and less suspect behaviour that Google are not filtering out.

If you're in a competitive, expensive market (Hosting, Finance, Property) then the risk of click fraud is going to be higher, as there's more incentive for scammers and competition. Otherwise, I don't see click fraud as being that big a deal. As long as your campaign is delivering a good ROI, then the system is working for you!