I was going through my email box today and an email from Search Marketing Standard caught my eye.  If you aren’t familiar, Search Marketing Standard is a magazine that  focuses on the world of paid and organic search.  Today’s email had an offer for a free whitepaper from one of their advertisers that caught my eye and I thought I would check it out.

Seven Ways to Stop and Prevent Click Fraud  is of course a pitch for the services of ClickForensics, a Search Engine Auditing firm that provides services to help merchants optimize their paid search.   They site some interesting numbers in their report including:

72.4% of all sites in the Yahoo Publisher Network and Google Ad-sense are parked domains or Made for Ad sites

That translates to “low quality sites- nothing to qualify or compel high quality visitors” in my book.

They also talk about the different sources of click fraud including “botnets” and competitors and some steps you can take to maximize ROI on your paid search campaigns.