Click Forensics announced the availability of Click Forensics for Publishers today. It allows websites to automatically block sources of click fraud and poor quality traffic from hitting Pay Per Click advertisements.  The news is a little short on details, so I suspect that they are customizing their technology for specific customers. There doesn’t seem to be a way to just submit your credit card and copy some HTML code to your website in order to use the service. But click fraud is a sticky subject.

Nobody knows exactly how big of a problem click fraud is, but Click Forensics is also the publisher of the Click Fraud Index. So presumably they can tell us. A week ago the company released some figures stating that click fraud on content networks (like AdSense) was 28.1%. A whopping number by any measure.

They say that can block "poor quality traffic" but I wonder what that means. It certainly would be cool to block international click traffic if you only sell to the U.S. market. Or to block traffic from people who don’t have cookies from major retail sites already on their computer. The possibilities are interesting.