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percent. Trademob found that 22 percent of clicks are accidental, while 18 percentare fraudulent. That could be one thing holding back mobile advertising as someadvertisers question how effective their spend is on mobile.Trademob — which aggregates more than 100 mobile ad networks and offers postdownloadconversion tracking to measure advertising efficiency — studied 6 millionclicks around the world over six weeks earlier this summer. Click fraud appears to bea growing issue, repeating some of the problems that online advertisers had to deal with,Alexander Franke, COO of Trademob told me in an phone interview. He said mobileclick fraud, which represented about 10 percent of clicks at the start of the year,falls into two main categories: server side and botnets/client side.Franke said 8 percent of clicks are createdby an app publisher who uses a server to register false clicks. A more sophisticatedproblem is when someone deploys botnets on a number of hijacked devices to manipulatemobile click data. And in some cases, fraudsters hide one banner ad behind anothergetting credit for both clicks. These two methods account for 10 percent of useless clicks,said Franke.Trademob uses its tracking software to analyze the header data and IP addresses fromclicks to identify suspicious clusters of activity. That can identify server-side fraud whenthe clicks come from the same IP addresses. For more sophisticated fraud, Trademob canidentify when fraudsters generate clicks that don‘t match the original campaign targetingsettings. For example, Trademob will notice when a mobile ad campaign targeting iPhoneusers in western Europe, suddenly sees a lot of clicks from hijacked Android phones inIndia. Trademob puts these publishers on a blacklist and won‘t advertise on them.Accidental clicks are actually a bigger problem than fraud, but the rate of accidentalclicks appears to be falling. Pontiflex ran its own survey with Harris Interactive lastyear and found that 47 percent of app users said they were more apt to click amobile ad by mistake than on purpose. It‘s not a straight comparison but Franke196