Click fraud is a crime, unique in the fact that the companies, who can implement measures to reduce it, have no intention of doing so. Each time a Pay Per Click ad is clicked, the search engine involved will receive either 100% of the revenue, or share it with an advert publisher. These are the winners, the losers being the company who has just been charged for a click which had no interest in buying the service being advertised.

How bad is click fraud? The answer to this is unknown, and the search engines are naturally playing down its prevalence. It is extremely difficult to measure on a large scale, therefore only the major search engines have an idea of the exact scale of click fraud. Google have mentioned that click fraud is “consistently under 10%”, which will equate to hundreds of millions of pounds being wasted each year.

The real worry is the ignorance that many companies who conduct their PPC or internet marketing activities in house show. Many companies do not have any kind of analytics software installed on their website, and even fewer look at detecting click fraud which is unbelievable, considering many Small / Medium size enterprises have PPC marketing budgets above the 10k per month range. Thousands of pounds are potentially being wasted each month because almost half of all companies refuse to pay a minimal management fee to an online marketing company.