Unfortunately, PPC by nature, is set up for fraud. Many unscrupulous advertisers will hire people to either “click through the competition” or set up “bots” to automate this process. It is certainly not the easiest problem in the world to stop, and also discovering it leads to a refund of the fraudulent charges to advertisers, and diminished profits for Google.
Yeah, 2 % CTR is not the greatest, but seems par for the course.
An interesting note this week was that Google’s earnings were way up when announced this week on tremendous growth on sales, but their prognosis for the future was somewhat bleak. Although the market got hammered today here in the US (down over 2 %), Google’s shares were down by over 5 %. Could be tougher time ahead, at the Plex.