Click Forensics™, Inc. released industry pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures for the third quarter 2007 from the search advertising industry’s leading independent click fraud reporting service – the Click Fraud Index™.

Now in its second year, the Click Fraud Index monitors and reports on data gathered from the Click Fraud Network™, which more than 4,000 online advertisers and agencies have joined. The Click Fraud Network provides statistically significant industry PPC data collected from online advertising campaigns for both large and small companies across all the leading search engines. Key findings from data reported for Q3 2007 include:

* The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.2 percent for Q3 2007. This is an increase from 13.8 percent for the same quarter in 2006 and from 15.8 percent for Q2 2007.

* The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.1 percent in Q3 2007. That’s up from 25.6 percent for Q2 2007, 21.9 percent for Q1 2007 and 19.2 percent for Q4 of 2006.

* Over 60 percent of traffic from parked domains and made for ad sites was click fraud

* In Q3 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from France (4.2 percent) China (4.1 percent) and Germany (3.7 percent).

Publishers and advertisers have recently felt the impact click fraud is having in the content networks. Increasingly, publishers are seeing a performance drop in the content network traffic quality. Advertisers are seeing their conversion rates drop significantly on content networks because of bad traffic coming from parked domains and other low quality sources.

“Click fraud activity continues to grow especially on made for ad sites, parked domains and on the content networks,” said Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics. “Advertisers, publishers and search engines need to take notice because content networks are becoming the fastest growing source of click fraud. Ensuring their quality is essential for the pay per click advertising market to continue its growth.”