It seems like one of the hottest topics in the world of SEM lately has been click fraud. Earlier this month Google released click fraud numbers that helped quell advertiser’s worries about paying for unwarranted clicks – Google reported that:

“Invalid clicks on Google AdWords ads have consistently remained under the 10-percent mark, and are generally in low single-digits… In addition, the amount of invalid clicks that are not proactively detected and are caught by advertisers is less than 0.02 percent” – source

In light of this, Yahoo has announced that they’re beefing up their click fraud effort by making an executive-level appointment focusing on marketplace quality & publicly disclosing the portion of invalid clicks they filter out for the first time ever.

So what is this number Yahoo is reporting? 12 – 15 percent. What does this mean? Yahoo identifies, tags & doesn’t bill advertisers for 12 – 15 percent of clicks that they deem invalid.

I’m happy to read that each of the major pay-per-click engines are actively engaged in filtering out invalid clicks & not charging advertisers. The team here at Amplify Interactive regularly monitors click patterns for each of our clients & looks for any irregularities that could be a sign of click fraud. Think of us as the safety net for the safety net when it comes to click fraud protection.