Google Click Fraud & How To Prevent It [2024 Guide]

Click fraud is one of the biggest issues that worry our clients, especially when it comes to Google ads.

$61 billion is a mind-boggling number of wasted ad spend.

Click fraud is a very valid concern in PPC marketing, with some clear ramifications:

• Budget Drain: This is the obvious concern - no company or marketer wants their budget drained by click fraud!
• Measurement Issues: When you get a ton of invalid or fraudulent clicks in your PPC campaigns, it can really distort your data and make accurate predictions and measurements very challenging.
• ROI Concerns: It can really mess up your ROI numbers. It might look like ROI is swinging wildly up and down if all of a sudden you have a large number of invalid clicks.

What is Click Fraud?

Click fraud is the practice of repeatedly clicking on a pay-per-click (PPC) advert, which generates worthless traffic and fraudulent charges for the advertiser. 

👉 The motivations for click fraud vary:

• Bot & Crawler Traffic - 47% of all internet traffic is from bots, and this problem is only getting worse with time. This is the most common source of click fraud. Often these clicks can be random in nature, rather than a targeted attack.
• Malicious Competitors - Competitor’s may be trying to deplete a rival’s advertising budget
• Greedy Publishers - Publishers might click on display ads to boost their own website earnings 
• Fraud Rings - This is where sophisticated criminals put together elaborate ad frauds.
• Accidental Clicks - The internet is full of real humans who will unfortunately click on ads by mistake (we’ve all done it) and thus sometimes advertisers can be charged for those accidental clicks. 

Famous Cases

👉 Here are some famous click fraud cases over the years.

1. Uber vs. Fetch Media (2017): Uber sued Fetch Media after they charged them for fraudlent ads. Incredibly, Uber paused $100m in ad spend and saw absolutely no difference in results! 
   • Source: Thecustomer.net
2. Lane's Gifts v. Google (2006): Lane's Gifts filed a class-action lawsuit against Google who eventually settled for $90 million, after becoming fed up of invalid clicks.
   • Source: New York University
3. Google DoubleClick Bid Manager Click Fraud (2017): The "HyphBot" ad fraud exploited Google's DoubleClick ad exchanges, generating fake ad impressions through fake websites.
   • Source: Clickcease
4. Methbot (2016): The Methbot clickfraud scam was reportedly responsible for up to $1 billion in losses to the advertising industry.
   • Source: Wikipedia
5. Google TrueView Fraud: This report alleges that Google misled advertisers (including fortune 500 brands) over many years through the way they charge for video ads.
   • Source: Adalytics

How to Protect Yourself From Click Fraud

There are some very important steps that marketers can take to help prevent click fraud from Google and other PPC platforms as well.

1. CAPTCHA - Add CAPTCHA to all forms and landing pages to help prevent bots from submitting anything.
2. Block Spam Scripts - Add any other spam protections add-ons that may help block automated script submissions.
3. Honeypot technique - Many forms now have a built-in 'honeypot' that shows a hidden form field to bots but not real users.
4. Location Targeting - Always ensure that you target ads to precise locations and avoid high-risk locations.
5. Adjust location Settings - to 'only presence in' to ensure ads only show to users actually located in the targeted areas.
6. Audience Settings - Make sure that you have tight audience settings in place.
7. Negative Keywords - Always add irrelevant keywords to your Google ads as negative keywords, especially high-volume generic terms.
8. Exact Match - The more precise you target your keywords, the less likely it is you'll fall victim to click fraud.
9. Avoid Display Ads - The Google Display Network is a notorious source of irrelevant / bot traffic, we recommend turning this off always within Google ads.
10. Raising Bids - Unfortunately, the lowest bidders on Google ads are typically landed with the lowest quality traffic. Get those bids to a competitive level to see the quality of traffic & customer improve.
11. Consider 3rd party click fraud tools- to help identify invalid and fraudulent clicks.  
12. Regular Reviews - You need to constantly monitor campaign performance, check for any abnormalities and tweak settings accordingly within Google ads.

The above is an incredibly common situation, especially for lead-generation clients like real estate, business services, home services etc.

The good news is that there's a simple solution to combatting this problem within Google ads...

What is Google Doing About Ad Fraud?

Google has invested heavily into preventing ad fraud.

The incentive for them is obvious - If they don't, they risk losing trust in their entire platform.

👉 Here are some of the things they're doing:

1. They use machine learning and automatic filters "to detect and filter as much invalid and fraudulent activity as possible."
2. They use automated detection systems to stop advertisers paying for invalid clicks e.g. if a user immediately bounces or they detect a bot click.
3. They manually review cases of click fraud the their automated systems might not have picked up on.

Wordstream wrote a report that identified the massive problem of click fraud in the display network, showing just how big of an issue this is, even with Google's system in place to try and weed out spammy sites with fake traffic.

This is one of the key reasons that we always recommend turning off search network & audience network on your Google ad campaigns.

Unfortunately, with Google's new AI-driven advertising campaign type 'performance max' you cannot turn this off.

It's not so much of a problem with Ecommerce sites because it's easy for Google to optimize towards the goal of sales. But as discussed, when Google is optimizing towards people filling out a form on a website, there's a much greater risk that their algorithm will push bot traffic or low-quality traffic to yout website.

How Does Google Compare vs. Other Ad Platforms?

In Google's defense, they're probably the most sophisticated company in the World when it comes to combatting click fraud, especially in search.

According to click fraud detection company Polygraph, these are the click fraud rates by ad network in 2024:

• TikTok Ads: 74%
• Twitter/X Ads: 61%
• Facebook Ads: 57%
• LinkedIn Ads: 48%
• Reddit Ads: 33%
• Microsoft Ads: 14%
• Google Ads: 11%
• Instagram Ads: < 1%

The Future of Click Fraud

Despite the rising prevalence of click fraud, there is hope for the future with new technology.

Let's look at some of the things that should help massively prevent click fraud in the future:

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) - This is already being used in large part by companies like Google, but the technology is still improving rapidly. AI will be able to analyze a huge amount of data and quickly spot patterns and anomalies to help identify likely bots or fraudulent activities way faster than any human possibly could.
2. Blockchain Technology - Essentially, blockchain could be used to track ad and verify ad clicks, so that you know each and every click is legitimate.
3. MFA - Platforms should have more advanced authentication features in the future, so that only real people are being set up with accounts. This clearly isn't the case right now, but this technology should improve.
4. Cross-Platform Data Sharing: Most of the general public won't like this, but platforms could share data to help identify fraudulent activity more easily. 

Summary

PPC marketing has some fantastic benefits, and the threat of click fraud shouldn't put you off entirely.

But if you're not completely on top of your Google Ads account and implementing things like lead qualification and enhanced conversions, then you do run the risk of falling victim to click fraud.

Our final piece of advice is just to monitor and measure everything - at the end of the day, ad networks like Google and Facebook are literally just huge, machine-driven algorithms. You need real humans in there making sure that they're actually driving qualified business leads through their advertising platforms.