Top Click Fraud Statistics 2023

Click Fraud “Latest” Statistics

In 2022, it is estimated that click fraud would cost $44 billion and $35 billion were lost to digital advertising fraud in 2018.
At the beginning of the pandemic, click fraud surged by 21% since more individuals were staying at home during lockdowns, increasing the possibility of fraud and bots affecting their ad marketing efforts.
36% of clicks on display ads are phony or invalid (Lunio, 2021), and 78% of marketers cite click fraud as their top concern (Adweek, 2016).
Googles shopping ads drive 76% of retail search ad spend, and accounts for 85.3% of all Google ad clicks.
According to Wordstream, typically, shoppers make a purchase within five days after their first search, 40% of all clicks on search searches go to the top 3 sponsored results, making visitors from PPC advertisements 50% more likely to make a purchase than organic visits.
Applying the 17% click fraud rate we discovered to this figure, we may estimate that the ecommerce sector lost $0.91 billion to click fraud.
We dug deep into the data at ClickGUARD to establish the extent of the click fraud problem and found that 17% of Google ads traffic is false.
In 2016 it was estimated that around $7.2 Billion dollars (£5.4 Billion pounds) was lost to click fraud.
The analysis projected that click fraud would rise by around 13% annually for the remainder of 2021, with linked TVs currently accounting for the majority of this growth.
Similarly, according to a report from PPC Protect, 36% of display ad clicks are illegitimate or fraudulent.
Comparing the same period in 2019 to the current one, click fraud in the health and medical industry increased by 53%.
Only 11% of all clicks on search advertising were discovered to be fake, which was the lowest percentage of fraud.
We expect that as CTV advertising grows in popularity, it will become an even more profitable channel for the click fraudsters, with a predicted rise of 31% to an overall rate of 22% for all CTV activity.
According to Jean-Loup Richet, Professor at the Sorbonne Business School, click fraud is frequently one link in the large ad fraud chain, and can be leveraged as part of a larger identity fraud and/or attribution fraud.
42% of all ad fraud was caused by app install farms. Click injection (30%) and click spam ad stacking (27%).
Click fraud affects 90% of all PPC ad campaigns on Google and Bing. While the Coronavirus epidemic was still in its early stages, click fraud rates increased by 21% source.
Companies spending $10,000 per month on Google Ads are estimated to be losing approximately $12,000-$15,000 each year to click fraud.
Industries with the highest rates of click fraud include photography (65%), pest control (62%), locksmiths (53%), plumbing (46%) and waste removal (45%).
Plumbing and pest treatment are two on-demand service sectors that might experience up to 60% click fraud on their sponsored advertisements.
Websites with ads.txt get 3.5% less ad fraud clicks than sites without ads.txt. (eMarketer, 2018).
According to our study and estimates, click fraud will rise by 16% overall in 2021 compared to 2020, with CTV linked TV activity accounting for the bulk of this rise.
In response, we forecast that app fraud will continue to increase at a startling pace, reaching new highs at over 40% of all click fraud activity.
There is less competition in the ad auction since there are fewer advertisements running, which reduces the cost per click. As a result, the click fraud rate eventually falls below the industry average of 15.35% .
According to our research, the education sector saw the greatest click fraud rates in 2020, with 31.14% of all clicks being fraudulent.
Apps accounted for 19% of all fraudulent clicks in 2020 as several publishers used ad stacking, click injection, and background ad running.
On the other hand, we forecast that click fraud on display advertising would climb by 12% to reach roughly 40% of clicks being fraudulent, while click fraud on search ads will decrease somewhat to just under 10% overall compared to 11% in 2020.
Interestingly, in our recent study of 410 PPC marketers, more than 50% of respondents believed that at least 45% of all fraudulent activity was comprised of rival click fraud.
Last but not least, according to our projections, competitor driven click fraud will drastically reduce from 17% of all click fraud to 11%, a 35% reduction caused by improved advertiser awareness of the problem.
They account for the least amount of fraudulent activity among the three major categories, accounting for just 17% of click fraud now, down from more than twice that only a few years ago.
Ad fraud statistics like these show that it is absolutely worthwhile to purchase an advertisement on a search engine like google as 41% of users won’t even go beyond the first three advertisements, much alone the organic results that appear initially.
In 2023, it is expected that digital advertising fraud would cost $100 billion. In 2021, more than 7 million businesses utilized Google Ads.
This indicates that 24% of the bots are deemed to be bots that are employed just for fraud and theft.
Compared to organic visitors, visitors through advertising are 50% more likely to make a purchase. According to data on advertising fraud, more than seven million firms used Google Ads in 2021.
According to Andreas Naumann, Head of Fraud at Adjust, mobile ad fraud affects 90% of individual campaigns.
The World Federation of Advertisers predicted that in 2016, the drug trade will overtake digital ad fraud as the world’s second largest industry for organized crime.
Their survey of 27 billion ad impressions from 50 digital ad companies put the cost of ad fraud in 2019 at $5.8 billion.
According to them, 10-15% of every dollar spent on digital ads online goes to businesses that make a valiant effort to shield advertisers from falling prey to ad fraud schemes.
Within a two year period, there was an 11% drop in the total cost of advertising fraud from the $6.5 billion recorded in 2017.
The methods and strategies used do not have a 100% accuracy rate primarily because con artists and fraudsters are always coming up with new schemes.
According to ANA (2016), bot fraud is 39% more common in ads with a CPM of more than $10 than in ads with lower.
$68 billion is expected worldwide ad spend lost to fraud this year.
According to a Forrester survey, at least 20% of the budgets of firms spending $1 million per month were lost to digital ad fraud.
Web fraud accounted for 28% of all website traffic in 2018, or $66 billion, according to Adobe. In-app advertising reduces fraud efforts by 25% compared to online advertising.
According to a TrafficGuard whitepaper, fraudulent activity cost digital advertisers $39 million per day over the course of 2017.
In a whitepaper issued by the ad fraud detection business TrafficGuard, Juniper Research provided statistics that indicated that one in 13 app installations worldwide in 2018 were not from legitimate consumers (7.7%).
Again, the largest country in the APAC area, China, was in the lead with $11 million losses from digital fraud for every $63 million that were spent on digital advertising per user annually, or a staggering 17%.
Appsflyer, a top mobile app analytics business, estimates that as of 2021, the leading sectors have the highest app install fraud rates. Food & Drink – 43%, Finance – 38%, Shopping – 17%, Entertainment – 15% and Gaming – 2%.
Ad fraud and other phony internet traffic schemes were anticipated to overtake the drug trade as the second largest industry for organized crime by the World Federation of Advertisers in 2016.
Based on this discovery, one commenter hypothesized that the entire cost of advertising fraud may reach $66 billion.
Device farming, which accounts for 37% of all digital ad fraud in the commerce sector, is the most prevalent kind of mobile ad fraud.
The first industry where SDK spoofing, a contentious topic, is found, accounts for 24% of all ad fraud, is the gaming industry.
The TrafficGuard digital ad verification and fraud prevention technology and Jupiter Research once again collaborated in 2019 to provide a thorough picture of the proportion of digital ad fraud in total ad expenditure in various countries.
In the United States, digital ad fraud accounted for 15% of the overall expenditure on advertising and squandered $62 million out of $407 million dollars each user.
Interesting and concerning for those wanting to address the complete spectrum of issues, 22% of ad fraud on android shopping applications is also caused by unidentified other types.