Sure, The U.S. Has A Lot Of Click Fraud, But At Least We're Not Vietnam

good_morning_vietnamWhen it comes to ad clicks, Anchor Intelligence says it has more data than anyone this side of Google and Yahoo. And so when they release a report for the first time outlining what they’re seeing in click fraud rates, it’s worth paying attention to. And the numbers are interesting.

This initial report spans the first 6 months of 2009. Clicks are broken down as “valid” or “invalid”, with “invalid” ones further broken down into “innocuous invalid” and “attempted click fraud”. That last classification is obviously the key one. Over those two quarters, Anchor Intelligence’s data indicates that click fraud has remained steady, increasing slightly in Q2 to 22.9%, up from 21.7% in Q1. Yes, it remains a problem.

But the real interesting data comes when you break down the click fraud rates by country, as the report does. While the U.S. is pretty bad with an attempted click fraud rate of just over 25%, that pales in comparison to Vietnam, which has an attempted click fraud rate approaching 50%. No other country is even close to them, as Canada is number 2 with a 27.7% attempted click fraud rate, and the U.S. is third.

And while the U.S. accounts for the majority of the clicks that Anchor Intelligence sees, it’s not like Vietnam is entirely insignificant on the list. Of the top 30 countries Anchor measures, Vietnam has the 6th most amount of click volume across the network.

Back in April, Anchor Intelligence announced that the search engine Ask became a client to try eliminate some of its click fraud. While the service is fairly secretive about who it works with, other Anchor clients include Technorati, LookSmart and Adbrite.

Find some of the key parts of the report below.

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