Hundreds of thousands of businesses advertise on Google AdWords but 80% of Google’s US revenue comes from about 1.5% of the advertisers.  Your business, like ours, is probably in the latter part.

The overall industry average click fraud rate in Q2 2009 was 12.7%. That’s down from 13.8% for Q1 2009 and from the 16.2% rate reported for Q2 2008.  (Click fraud is a type of Internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link.)

Google AdWords advertiser data (Source: SEM Rush)

The paid clicks in Q2/2009

were up 15 percent year-over-year, but down 2 percent from the first quarter.

One advertiser has lost a ton of money by incorrectly configuring  Google Adwords account settings. Something as innocuous as a decimal point accidentally typed in the wrong position has cost some advertisers dearly because like the majority they didn’t think to check their account regularly. Please note that  you must check your Google Adwords account as often as possible. Most business owners delegate this task – but even so just a few minutes a day and even the most stressed business owner can monitor their account.