In case you are interested, I posted a more detailed response at http://blog.searchanyway.com/2007/06/click_fraud_dont_believe_the_h.html

… and Chris actually did another vlog in response to that at:

http://blog.searchanyway.com/2007/06/revisiting_click_fraud.html

Boris

Thanks for your .02¢, it’s always nice to hear other thoughts.

Maybe because I’m ever the optimist, but I tend to lean more toward the belief that people don’t really do it. In the video, Chris stated that maybe it really only happens on highly competitive words who’s CPC is $15 – $30.

I agree with you that nobody can really tell. Interesting to talk about it though.

Thanks for the comment.
Diana

It’s an interesting video, indeed.

In general, if a legitimate visitor clicks on your ads and leaves within a few moments because he doesn’t find what he/she was looking for, that certainly doesn’t constitute click fraud. Rather, it’s a poor job done by the advertiser to attract the right type of visitor via ad text and/or a poor job of keeping the visitor on the site due to a bad landing page.

However, on the other side of the coin, we also have clicks coming from people that click with the intent of either profiting themselves or hurting the advertiser.

For example, back in the day, it was a pretty popular thing for AdSense publishers to say – “click on my ads to support the website”. The visitors could click because it doesn’t cost them anything and they wanted to support the site and the site owner encouraged it because it generated revenue for him. And who pays for this? The advertiser.

This type of thing is not that common anymore because Google closes down those accounts when they see them. However, these days, it simply takes a different form.

Or let’s take a look at other advertisers. You can have fraudulent clicks coming from your competition, you can have impressions generated to lower somebody else CTR ratio (and effectively raise their prices or lower their ads, etc.).

The problem is that nobody can tell you exactly how rampant this issue is. Mainly because it’s different for every advertiser.

But in my line of work, we have clients coming to us all the time that exhibit signs of click fraud… and upon further investigation, it is oftentimes there.

Just my $0.02c.

Boris Mordkovich
http://www.adwatcher.com