Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Yesterday Google announced a new reporting feature on Adwords that shows how many "invalid clicks" you're gettting on your Adwords ads. The obvious problem with this new report is that it doesn't do anything about fraudulent clicks that aren't being tracked, it only reports on the ones Google catches, but I see it as a huge step by Google. None of the other PPC engines offer anything similar (not yet, anyway). The actual usefulness of these reprots remains to be seen. If nothing else, it will give you an idea of (1) how many fraudulent clicks Google caught, and (2) how prevalent click fraud is in your particular industry/keyword niche.

The reports are accessible under the "Reports" section of your Adwords account. Just click "add columns" on the report settings and you'll see the option to get reports on "invalid clicks." Google has more details about the new feature in their support section.

I did a couple quick reports to see how this thing works and one account in an insurance related niche had just over 4% fraudulent clicks (..er, invalid clicks) on a very small number of total clicks. Another one in a high CPC niche (credit repair) had 3.8% invalid clicks on about 2500 clicks. Another account had over 7% invalids from a couple thousand clicks--with a few smaller campaigns as high as 25% invalid clicks!

I think Google is doing the best job of catching click fraud and owning up to it, but I can't help but wonder how much click fraud still sneaks under the radar.

In their blog post, Google accuses click fraud activists of overestimating how big the problem is due to financial incentive to do so...this may be true, but couldn't the opposite be true about Google and friends on the opposite end of the spectrum? Don't they have a HUGE financial incentive to make click fraud seem like a tiny issue? The actual size of the click fraud problem is probably somewhere in between the two estimates, but I have a feeling it's more towards the higher end estimates.