The End Of Ad Based Revenue?

A recent study by Click Forensics has revealed a frightening trend for sites that generate revenue through advertising: fraud is on the rise!

“The overall industry average click fraud rate grew to 17.1 percent for the fourth quarter of 2008. That’s up from 16.0 percent in the third quarter of 2008 and from the 16.6 percent rate reported for the fourth quarter of 2007,”

One of the main sources of this type of fraud is BotNet traffic generators. These little programs are often embedded in viruses, trojans, and backdoor vulnerabilities. They basically give some control over your computer to a third party that will use your PC as a money generating machine for their ads.

So what does this mean for the Travel Industry?

If you use Google Ad Words to market your product / website, the likelyhood is that your ad dollars are going to these scammers. In the long run if this issue continues to grow, your budget will have to grow in order to attract the qualified leads that you require to grow your business.

In the meta perspective, the faith in online advertising may begin to diminish. The number of scammers is on the rise, and they are constantly looking for new ways to cheat people for money (I was personally on the receiving end of a sophisticated BotNet virus last week). As the reliability of leads begins to deteriorate, companies may start to feel that the Internet is not necessarily providing the most trackable advertising model.

If online advertising is a major focus of your ad spend, you may want to consider using a traffic quality service like Click Forensics or see what Google is doing with the Ad Traffic Quality Centre.