One can appreciate the true scale of clickfraud when one of the people testifying to its success earlier does a 180 and cries clickfraud after a thorough investigation of its PPC operation.

You may have even heard of Thys and his company before. Radiator.com was featured in a Google case study that focused on small-to-medium sized companies finding success in Google AdWords. Radiator.com started out spending $1,000 a month on PPC ads, but quickly increased that number to a hefty $20,000 when the ads appeared to be working.

It wasn’t until Thys conducted a review to evaluate the company’s marketing efforts that something seemed amiss. He brought in an outside contractor to analyze the data, who then received an offer from San Francisco-based company Click Tracks to look over the results further. They did and came back with some alarming results.

In one month, 35 percent of the company’s Google clicks and 17 percent of their Yahoo! clicks were labeled fraudulent. Thys immediately emailed Google (they have not yet contacted Yahoo!), the engine his company had been on such good terms with before, and explained the situation. Thys says he received an email back that said something to the effect of: “thanks for the data, and by the way, our algorithms are smarter than you…”

There are bigger issues involved here. How does Google define fraudulent clicks? How do advertisers define it? How does this play into the click fraud court settlement issue? Should we invest in click fraud detection services? Will click fraud be the next mesothelioma for attorneys (and adsense players)? Does Yahoo! Search Marketing perform better than Google AdWords in the anti-clickfraud arena? Can we really afford not to invest in PPC?

I tried searching for the Radiator.com case study in Google but I couldn’t find it. They must have taken it down.