Google and click fraud

Click fraud has long been a issue for marketers that have voiced their qualms with Google and other search engines, but to no avail.

On March 1, Google's Shuman Ghosemajumder revealed 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.

In order to prevent advertisers from being billed for invalid clicks, proactive filters catch the invalid clicks in real time, which prevents the clicks from appearing on bills or metrics. Not all of the clicks removed here are fraudulent; some are questionable, or have been deemed invalid by Google, such as the second click of a double-click.

Google's click quality team also performs offline analysis. These are the clicks that show up on advertisers' statements as click quality adjustments. Clicks that are detected at this stage are still not billed to the advertiser, but they do show up in click metrics, so they affect ROI measurements.

In addition, next month, Google plans to give advertisers the ability to prevent their pay-per-click ads from being shown to competitors suspected of repeatedly clicking on the ads to drive up their cost. The announcement came via Google's AdWords blog.