ClickForensics More Information Overall Rating: Not Rated Pay Per Click Universe Recommends: AdWatcher - 100% Click Fraud Protection. Concerned about click fraud? Protect your online advertising dollars with the world's most trusted & accurate click fraud solution on the market today. AdWatcher will put a stop to competitors and fraudsters who are looking to drain your hard earned advertising budget. Test-Drive AdWatcher For FREE For 30 Days! Click Forensics has been the topic of a lot of speculation lately. Behind this interest is a report from the company suggesting that click fraud is, in fact, occuring at a much lower rate than most PPC experts estimate - they suggest a click fraud rate of approximately 14% versus the 20% to 40% rate that most others believe to be the case. Click Forensics is located in Texas and offers a click fraud detection program for enterprise-sized companies (using a measure of more than 100,000 clicks per month as a rough cut-off point). The company does offer a product for businesses with up to 100,000 click per month, however. CF Analytics is a free product that is available to any business that signs up to join the Click Fraud Network, an organization formed with the aim of fighting click fraud. Data collected from members of the Network is aggregated and reported as the Click Fraud Index (which is the source for the 14% click fraud rate recently publicized). CF Analytics provides tracking of potential click fraud only, not other analytics. If you decide to use the free product, remember that by placing the proprietary tagging code on your landing page you will also be agreeing to have statistics from your website included in the database from which the Click Fraud Index is drawn. The company assures that no personal information will be reproduced in any report, just across-the-market data. Since Click Forensics is still in its early stages on the market, it is premature to judge the accuracy of the results of CF Analytics. There have been suggestions, however, that the process used may not be detailed enough to detect "clicker" software that attempts to replicate normal behavior and thus fool click fraud detectors. If this proves to be the case, it could account for the surprisingly low 14% rate for click fraud that Click Forensics alleges. As well, it is likely that the relatively small pool from which the statistics have been drawn so far may be artificially deflating the real click fraud rate. Whatever the case, Click Forensics has limited itself to saying that its user base consists of hundreds of sites, but does not indicate the relative size of these sites or which industries they represent. It is impossible, therefore, to place much certainty on its aggregate statistics until more is known about the make-up of its users. We'll revisit Click Forensics later this year to see if their assessment of the degree of click fraud changes as their database gains more member websites and historical records are made. At this point, CF Analytics (the free tool available if you register in the Click Fraud Network and thereby allow the company access to your stats) may be useful in monitoring click fraud, but it would be prudent to compare results to another tracking system before reaching conclusions on how much click fraud may be affecting your specific site. |
