Click Forensics®, Inc. today released advertising audience quality figures for the fourth quarter 2009 from the industry's leading independent online advertising and click fraud data reporting service. Now in its fourth year, the Click Forensics reporting service provides statistically significant data collected from Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising campaigns for both large and small advertisers across all leading search engines as well as comparison shopping engines and social networks. Traffic across more than 300 ad networks is reflected in the data. Key findings for Q4 2009 include:

• The overall industry average click fraud rate was 15.3 percent. That's up from 14.1 percent for Q3 2009 and down from the record 17.1 percent rate reported for Q4 2008.
• In Q4 2009, the countries outside North America with significant CPC traffic producing the greatest volume of click fraud were the Ukraine, Japan, and the Czech Republic, respectively.

"While the overall industry click fraud rate rose slightly in the fourth quarter, it was the lowest we've seen for this time of the year," said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. "This seems to indicate that ad networks, publishers and the search engines themselves are doing a better job catching the click fraud spikes that have become common during the busy search marketing holiday season."

Since 2006, Click Forensics has published online advertising industry data collected from the first independent third-party Cost Per Click (CPC) and Internet advertising fraud detection service. The service monitors online media traffic across over 300 ad networks as well as billions of clicks from top search engines, comparison shopping engines, social networks, leading publishers and advertiser web sites - providing the most accurate view of online advertising audience quality to date.