Traffic Flow SEO

Some disturbing recent news from Click Forensics for all those that run paid search campaigns. Here are some interesting bullets from a recent findings press release:

- The overall industry average click fraud rate grew to 17.1% for Q4 2008. That’s up from 16.0% in Q3 2008 and from the 16.6% rate reported for Q4 2007.

- The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.2%. That’s up from the 27.1% rate reported for Q3 2008 and down slightly from the 28.3% rate reported for Q4 2007.

- Traffic from botnets was responsible for 31.4% of all click fraud traffic in Q4 2008. That’s up from the 27.6% rate reported for Q3 2008 and the 22.0% rate reported for Q4 2007.

- In Q4 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside the U.S. came from Canada (7.4 percent), Germany (3.0 percent) and China (2.3 percent).

It seems like the battle against click fraud is growing and becoming a bigger and bigger problem for many people. Below is a heat map outlining where Click Forensics has identified threat locations.



While there is not a single source for bot or botnet traffic there are many flagrant sources that hide these networks and try to sell it off as legitimate traffic. Most of these networks parade themselves as second or third tier search networks. Some of better marketed organizations include:



What is interesting is that ABC Search says that it has search volume of 250 million plus searches a day (as per their website statistics - updated by the minute). While they do have some interesting partners like Yahoo (please note that if you dig deeper, this Yahoo partnership does not includes the US) and Ask which are both respectable partners, but they also have engines listed that were made with $20 PPC scripts with decent logos (no one would ever actually use Primo Search unless they were forced into it and accidentally typed something in). Redzee is also another engine that is an 'offical' partner and often sited for unscrupulous business practices (many times flat out called a scam) see Google results for a common search on, 'Redzee Search' and you will quickly see what I mean.

ABC Search Partners

So, where does that leave us? Well if these networks continue to grow and no one is actually using (or intending to use) them where does all this traffic come from? You decide.

My recommendations to combat this problem are simple:

1. Only use the big four search engines for PPC campaigns (Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live and Ask)

2. Ask Yahoo, MSN/Live and Ask to only provide traffic from within their network and/or partners that do not include aggregators of second tier search traffic.

3. Use a third-party (trusted) click fraud monitoring company.

4. If you are in the US, ask for all Canadian traffic be turned off.

If everyone would do this it would go a long way in reducing the overall click fraud from bot traffic on the Web.

For more information on the recent Click Forensics press release click here - Industry Click Fraud Rate Higher Than Ever Reaching 17.1% in Q4 2008

For more information on click fraud in general click here - Wikipedia on Click Fraud

Also, just a quick side note to ABC Search. If you are going to claim that you are approved by 'ClickDefense.com' as providing legitimate traffic at least use a source that only identifies you as a client and bothers to update the copyright date on their site (last updated in 2005). Also, do you own this company? Disclosure would be nice as it appears to have been built exclusively for you.