According to Andy Jones, a member of Best Practices Search Engine Forums, fraudulent clicks are just another aspect of business. "Any of us that use AdWords or any other PPC has to pay for a certain percentage of fraudulent clicks," he said in a forum discussion. "I factor it in as a cost of doing business." Can you believe that? In other words, he's saying, I know pay-per-click companies are stealing my money, but it's okay, because I've considered that fact ahead of time.
Unfortunately, that mentality is pervasive among pay-per-click advertisers. No wonder pay-per-click companies aren't making stopping pay-per-click fraud a top priority. Who can blame them? If their advertisers don't care, why should they? Heck, with all of money pay-per-click companies are making, it's actually more cost effective to issue an occasional refund, than to develop technology to eliminate click fraud.
And if you read between lines of following statement, Google even admitted as much:
In a recent filing to Securities and Exchange Commission, Google acknowledged, "We are exposed to risk of fraudulent clicks on our ads. We have regularly paid refunds related to fraudulent clicks and expect to do so in future. If we are unable to stop this fraudulent activity, these refunds may increase. If we find new evidence of past fraudulent clicks, we may have to issue refunds retroactively of amounts previously paid to our Google Network members."
That statement doesn't exactly instill any confidence, now does it?
And if Overture is asked about click fraud, they'll just issue their standard company line:
"Our Click Protection System is sophisticated software that evaluates each of our advertisers' clicks. This software makes decisions as to validity of any click. Our Click Protection System uses search and click data to make both rules-based inferences and pattern recognition-based inferences about which clicks are valid clicks. We have two patents pending related to this technology, so we cannot currently disclose too many details about methods we use."