I love Saturday Night Live, and I always hang in there during the (frequent) rebuilding years. There was a skit last weekend about a Monster in a little girl’s closet. Long story short, not only did her parents believe her and immediately become hysterical – eventually the suave monster came out of her closet and began singing “Here Comes Santa Claus”. It was twisted, the best skit of the night and also kinda timely given this recent report.

Every time I discuss SEM in open company, or meet a new PPC client for the first time, the discussion invariably turns to the horrors of click fraud. You’ve no doubt heard the ghost stories about the insipid teams of people in Prague and India who are paid by your competitors to do nothing except click your PPC ads all day and kill puppies. This poppycock has dangerously passed into the realm of truth for most peripheral online marketers, and it’s time to put this Boogeyman to bed.

Andy Beal’s scoop from Search Engine Strategies is straight from the Googleplex, so have a read and learn about the impressive security measures in place within AdWords. 4 levels of security, to be exact. Simply put, actual click fraud within AdWords totals less than 2%:

“This is an amazing revelation and clearly shows that Google is getting tired of speculation and rumor filling the void left by the lack of transparency Google has with regards to their click fraud numbers… The biggest reason Google has for being hesitant about revealing the exact numbers, is fear that Yahoo and Microsoft will be able to leverage the numbers to deduce more information about AdWords.”

I am putting a lot of my faith in these numbers – admittedly mainly because they reinforce what I’ve always believed. At the least this level of security should appease some of the skeptics. PPC, when done correctly, can be such an effective traffic and revenue generator that it should never be discounted because of what equates now to little more than an urban myth. Boo!