2009 sees significant drop in click fraud

Click forensics a leading companies that monitors PPC clicks have reported significant drop in click fraud in 2009 compared to 2008. http://www.clickforensics.com/resources/click-fraud-index.html According to the above URL click fraud originates mostly from Russia, UK etc. I am personally surprised by the number of botnet spammers in UK. I feel the regulations in UK is too easy to exploit. Spammers take advantage of the lenient laws in UK to spam with botnet. Lots of online spam and online fraud originate from UK. There had been reports of increased phishing activities by UK nationals. Some of them have agents in Nigeria to hide their original identity.

Compared to 1st and 2nd quarter there has been an increase in 3rd quarter it’s probably because of the start of holiday season, botnet spammers are taking advantage of the holidays to earn money running botnet.

Click forensics claim their data is most accurate because it is done by an independent detective agency which specializes in click fraud. They seem to monitor over 300 ad networks and 1000s of advertiser’s own websites.

Google does it again now badder and stronger slap

I have already complained of weird PPC behavior where I had 10/10 quality score but my ad was 5$ for a 5$ highest bid keyword. Usually I tend to get very low prices when I get such quality score but here Google wanted me to pay full even if my quality score was great. I thought it’s a singled out problem but now I realize I am not alone. Lot of other people in webmaster world has faced similar problems.
One webmaster in webmaster world says he has terrible problem with the current Adwords scoring system. It’s too tough and since its completely automated it is bound to make mistakes. Human’s are much better in judging and the webmaster highlights that in his post here http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/4020049.htm . I second his thoughts i feel the whole quality score thing should become much more lenient. It’s too tough now and sometimes it’s also very faulty. We have clients spend at least 100,000$ a month with adwords but still not getting good quality score because of minor mistakes handling 1000s of pages. We sometimes manage large campaigns with 100s of landing pages and there are some pages which might not be relevant and that one page affects a ad group and certain important keywords. We need to keep our eyes always open to identify such type of problems.
Taking action automatically is fine but if an account is having some problem automated closure shouldn’t happen. A reviewer should review and give the final word. Yahoo does that but Google prefer to depend on automated methods. If some cases this has proved to be true. Google’s method of depending on automatic validation is not working as expected. It’s weird results are hurting some Businesses like for one of our client. I feel Google will look into this issue more deeply and will take action.