The damage estimates are debatable, but there is an undeniable industry consensus : click fraud is a serious problem. For all its media attention, it is still a definite ache for advertisers with no clear short term solution.

The big risk for agencies like us isn’t that we’ll be put under, though that could certainly be possible for someone with a particularly malicious intent. The risk is in resource allocation, namely, that click farms steal not only from your revenue and the client’s ROI, but from your message’s audience-reach in a system where budget and breadth is controlled by click rates.

Inherently advertising is an industry of associative risk. Even spending a mint on a fold-out in a nationally circulated magazine doesn’t ‘guarantee’ results. Success is certainly variable, but historically ads have always had the possibility for success, and were packaged with content that was known to directly reach its audience.

The biggest tragedy in click fraud scams is not the immediate crunch on the budget, it’s that for the first time someone with ill-intent is able to completely prevent an ad from reaching its market. And while Google can make sure your copy is served only in the most pertinent and potentially profitable instances, it at this moment can’t prevent one or one thousand people from draining that advertisement of all of its viability. It’s tantamount to the delivery drivers tearing that fold-out insert from every copy of the magazine before it hits the stand. Sure the ad was ‘served’ a million times, but its reach to the target audience was non-existent.

The search engines and the judicial systems are presently battling it out over cost accountability on the issue. As trackability and statistics improve, this is certainly something that will be viewed in a much clearer analytical framework. Presently damage projections vary from one another by as much as double, and third party evaluation capabilities are still fraught with trip-ups.

But even as the major search engines improve their capabilities, and other companies grow in their abilities to monitor them, the damage done to ad effectiveness will continue. Therefore the most important thing that any client or agency can do is to develop analytics not for fraudulent clicks, but definite sales. Investing your efforts in hawkishly patrolling your conversion rates at the most granular level is not only a way to refine your copy writing approach, it’s the surest method in limiting the impact of unsaleable clicks. And that, of course, begets an evolutionary fast-track to the optimum ROI.