Analytics
Click Fraud
Click fraud is the practice of generating illegitimate clicks on pay-per-click ads, by bots or competitors, to waste an advertiser's budget or distort data.
It can quietly drain spend without producing real customers. For example, a competitor repeatedly clicking your ads can exhaust your daily budget before genuine buyers see it. Detection tools and click-fraud protection help block invalid traffic and reclaim wasted spend.
Search partners and display placements account for most invalid traffic, and both can be reviewed directly. The placement report shows where display ads actually ran, which regularly includes apps and sites nobody would have chosen deliberately, and those can be excluded permanently. Google filters obvious invalid clicks automatically and credits them back, so the reported figure already excludes some of the problem. The traffic worth investigating is what gets through: repeat clicks from a narrow IP range, or a geography with clicks and no conversions ever. For most search accounts this is a smaller problem than it is made out to be.
Example
A campaign's placement report shows one mobile game app delivering 4,000 clicks at 2 baht with zero conversions and 3-second sessions: bot traffic wearing a placement. Excluding the app category cuts spend 11% with no revenue change. Search-side, an IP range clicking a competitor's brand term nightly gets excluded, and Google's own invalid-click filter refunds a further 2% automatically.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I know if I have a click fraud problem?
- Look for spikes in clicks with no conversions, unusually high click-through from specific placements or geographies you do not target, repeated clicks from the same IP ranges, and very short sessions in analytics. Display and search partner placements are the usual sources.
- What can I actually do about click fraud?
- Exclude problem placements and locations, tighten targeting away from broad partner networks, use IP exclusions where the pattern is clear, and claim refunds through the platform's invalid traffic process. Dedicated click fraud tools help mainly on high-spend display accounts.
Related terms
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