Get the most from your advertising and marketing campaigns, particularly cost per click advertising. Protect yourself from click fraud. There is a new site that is empowering the little guy to assist in auditing and keeping the large networks honest. In all honestly it is not the networks defrauding anyone but those who are clicking on advertisements fraudulently.

Click Fraud
The Click Fraud Network is here and the benefits are below. You can join their network for free and keep up to date.

• Create a community of advertisers to pool information, resources and ideas. This is the genesis of the Click Fraud Network. Members can discuss solutions, take advantage of free reports using their patent pending algorithm to track click fraud threat levels. The network will publish the Click Fraud Index, a site dedicated to educating advertisers on industry trends and information. They believe it does take a community to address the issue of click fraud.
• Define the industry standards for what an unwanted click looks like. They believe that there are certain characteristics or attributes that are common to a large percentage of click fraud. They are working with publishers and advertisers to agree on common ground and work together to expose it. Once this is developed it should be published so that the entire community can benefit from it.
• Agree on a format to submit reports to search providers. If they can improve the process of communication between the advertiser and the search provider, they believe that unwanted clicks can be identified much sooner. This process would allow for improved identification of those trying to beat the system as well as a fair forum to be sure advertisers are getting what they pay for.

They provide useful services such as:

Click Fraud Network Index:

They aggregate data anonymous data collected from our members and aggregated for the purpose of tracking industry trends.

Click Fraud Network Blog:

Articles and engage in discussion with other members of the Click Fraud Network.

If you are deciding whether or not to join take a look at these stats that they publish, you can join for free The here.

• 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

These stats alone are reason enough to join and read about the Click Fraud Network Forensics click fraud tracking service to determine if you are being unfairly charged for fraudulent clicks.