Anchor Intelligence Reports Average Attempted Click Fraud Rate Declines from 23% to 19% in Q3 2009

Egypt and Indonesia Join Vietnam as Emerging Hotbeds of Attempted Click Fraud

October 28, 2009 -- MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Anchor Intelligence, the leading provider of traffic quality solutions, today released the Q3 Anchor Intelligence Traffic Quality Report. In the third quarter of 2009, the Anchor Intelligence network saw the average attempted click fraud rate fall from 22.9% in Q2 to 18.6% in Q3 – a decrease of almost 19%.

Anchor Intelligence attributes this decline to two major factors: increased vigilance and enforcement of traffic quality standards by current Anchor customers, as well as slightly lower attempted click fraud rates among new Anchor network customers.

“Anchor customers were able to leverage ClearMark traffic quality scores to filter out poor quality traffic and evict fraudulent publishers, which contributed to the decline in the attempted click fraud rate this quarter,” said Ken Miller, CEO of Anchor Intelligence. “By cutting off the revenue stream for many click fraud operations, Anchor Intelligence has effectively convinced perpetrators to look outside of the Anchor network for vulnerabilities.”

In addition to the network-level rates, Anchor Intelligence also reported traffic quality rates for the top 30 countries by traffic volume. The countries with the highest attempted click fraud rates were Vietnam (30.2%), Egypt (29.6%), and Indonesia (25.5%). The majority of this traffic was the result of large-scale, coordinated click fraud rings and high velocity botnet traffic. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Canada continued to show high attempted click fraud rates at 21.2% and 20.8% respectively, which is noteworthy given that these countries account for the greater part of overall traffic volume.

“While network level attempted click fraud rates have declined, the methods used to perpetrate click fraud have grown in sophistication and variety,” said Richard Sim, VP of Product Management and Marketing. “Advertisements have become an increasingly common infection vector for payloads like browser hijackers and other forms of malware. Ad networks and search engines should pay close attention to such threats as we enter the holiday season.”

ClearMark, Anchor’s real-time traffic scoring system, classifies traffic according to quality, enabling customers to differentiate invalid traffic from valid traffic in stream before it can impact advertiser spend. Additionally, ClearMark distinguishes between attempted click fraud – clicks or impressions generated with malicious intent, for which advertisers have not necessarily been billed – and other invalid traffic, such as double clicks, traffic from self-identified robots, and internal clicks. Based on Anchor’s analysis of data from customers, the average invalid rate for Anchor customers declined considerably from 27.1% in Q2 for 23.2% in Q3. The Q3 invalid rate was comprised of an 18.6% average attempted click fraud rate and a 4.6% other invalid rate.

The “Anchor Intelligence Traffic Quality Report” follows “The Uninvited Guest: A Browser Hijacking Experience, Dissected,” which was recently released to help educate the industry on ways to avoid browser hijackers and minimize their consumption of ad spend this holiday season. The “Anchor Intelligence Traffic Quality Report: Q3 2009” is available to qualified ad networks and members of the online advertising industry. For more information, click here: http://www.anchorintelligence.com/anchor/resources/category/traffic_qual....

Source: Anchor Intelligence