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With reports that over 50% of PPC ad revenue comes from fraudulent clicks, it appears that the Google/Overture cash cow may be experiencing some growing pains.
When I read that I could not believe it. 50%? So I read the article and it said this:
According to research released by Web analytics provider Clicklab, fraudulent clicks can account for more than 50 percent of all advertising fees attributable to certain categories.
That´s not 50%,.. that´s 50 % of certain categories. Thus the majority of categories are fine. Just a few categories that are really terrorized by click fraud.

Please do not represent the reality in a way that would scare many people away for the wrong reasons.

This sounds more like less than 0.1 % of all clicks are fraudulent, and even that is probably a high estimate.

However, some categories may be extremely competitive which would force some advertisers into less than honorable practices.

The idea that clickfraud would be generated by owners of adsense accounts doesn't seem very logical to me. It would simply cost too much and fraud is much easier to detect. When you do arrange for people to click on your adsense ads, you would have to make sure that all kinds of behavior patterns would be consistently random/natural. The chance for Google to pick up these kind of fraudulent clicks is easy to detect.

But, of course there are those that are able to fool the detection systems. However, If click fraud would be such a huge problem as it is made to believed, then hardly anybody would be making any money from PPC.

Lets see what you can do if you suspect click fraude:

1) Lower your Max bid! That position 1 isn't half as effective as position 3 or 4.

2) Increase CTR

3) Learn which ads work best. Never stop learning. Always try to create even better ads.

If you can manage to improve your ad performance, your positions will go up again, which means you can lower your max bid even more. Your fraudulent competitor will see his costs rise and rise while your costs go down. His fraudulent clicks will then become very helpful to you.

In the end PPC is not about how much you pay per click, but about how much you make per click.