40 per cent of clicks on advertisements from a mobile device are useless for marketers, according to a study released by app marketing platform Trademob, generating a conversion rate of less than 0.1 per cent.

“Mobile app marketers are demanding a greater level of accountability when it comes to ad spend,” said Trademob CEO and founder Ravi Kamran. “There’s a problem when only 60 cents of every dollar are actually being put to work.”

Thats down to accidental misclicks (which make up 22 per cent of all ad clicks) – though the number of accidental clicks is dropping, apparently, due to increased device screen size and changing user behaviour. 

The other 18 per cent of clicks are overtly fraudulent – 56 per cent of which are the result of sophisticated botnet and client-side fraud, which typically involve hijacked devices on which viruses are installed, creating fake clicks that go unnoticed by the user.

The study is based on analysis of 6m clicks during June 2012, across 10 top advertising networks.