Clicks are cheap

Approximately 17.1% of all clickthroughs on web advertising are fraudulent.

Click Forensics just released their latest report (courtesy of TechCrunch) showing that click fraud continued to rise steadily throughout 2008.

Alarming is the fact that over 30% of click fraud is now coming from automated bots — a 14% increase from last quarter and the highest rate Click Forensics has seen since it started collecting data. Click fraud for ads on content networks like Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network was up to 28.2% from last quarter, though that figure has decreased since Q4 2007.

It reminds me of the phrase, “Talk is cheap.”

In this case, “Clicks are cheap.” I’m not talking about the cost of buying clicks (although CPM rates have continued to plummet), but the value of a click on average. Anyone — or any automated software program for that matter — can click on an ad for any reason: whimsical, malicious, accidental. Even legitimate clicks have tremendous range in their suitability and intent.

To bend another adage: post-click actions speak louder than clicks.

What people do after that first click reveals much more about who they are — in a surprisingly small number of steps. Click fraud bots are a piece of cake to spot, as they bail quickly and give themselves away with repeated patterns. Even egregious human click fraud sticks out like a sore thumb when you contrast it with the behaviors of legitimate respondents.

If you’re paying attention to your post-click performance and analytics, you can catch these fakers and cut down your click fraud expense by 1/3 or more. We’ve had clients save thousands of dollars with even one pass through their post-click logs.

Yes, ad networks and publishers are making various attempts to reduce click fraud on the source side, but their economic incentives to do so aren’t quite as strong as they are for advertisers. Even for those with the best intentions, it’s good for you — the advertiser — to have some checks and balances to look after your own interests.

But click fraud is merely a special case of a bigger challenge: understanding that all clicks are not equal, separating and segmenting your audience into more specific and more meaningful engagements.

It’s true that post-click marketing is a second-order problem: you don’t have to deal with it until you solve the problem of getting clicks. But getting clicks, despite being a first-order problem, is not hard to solve if you’re only looking for volume. Getting quality clicks is a much tougher challenge, and that’s where post-click marketing becomes the fulcrum by which you can lift the world.