Google Ads click fraud protection

An introduction to click fraud

If the results of your online ads disappoint for no apparent reason, one possible cause is click fraud. Anyone who invests in advertising on Google, Facebook or Instagram runs, sooner or later, into invalid clicks and bot-generated traffic. Online advertising remains one of the most effective ways of attracting customers - but fraudulent traffic has to be understood and kept under control.

Types of click fraud

Click fraud means any interaction with a paid ad that has no genuine interest or real chance of conversion behind it: clicks on paid search results, on display ads, on sponsored videos or on sponsored app downloads.

Competitive click fraud

Competitors can generate repeated clicks on your ads, exhausting your daily budget and pushing your ads out of the results.

Ad stacking

Several ads are stacked on top of each other. Users do not see all of them, but the advertiser pays for each one.

Pixel stuffing

Fraudulent publishers load ads into a 1×1 pixel. Invisible to users - but billed to the advertiser.

Click bots

Complex schemes inject malware onto computers to generate automatic clicks on ads, at scale.

The impact of click fraud

Click fraud raises costs considerably and lowers campaign efficiency:

• Global losses from click fraud could reach USD 172 billion a year by 2028
• Around 90% of PPC campaigns are affected to some degree by fraudulent traffic
• Global spend lost to fraud was estimated at USD 23 billion as early as 2019

What you can do

The first step is correct measurement: conversion tracking set up by the book, so you see the difference between clicks and customers. Then: exclusions of suspicious IPs and placements, monitoring of click patterns and, where the volume justifies it, dedicated fraud protection solutions.

If you want a check of your Google Ads account, request a free audit - we tell you concretely how much of the budget goes to traffic that can never become a customer.