ValidVisit
Guide

What is click fraud? A practical guide for advertisers

Click fraud is invalid clicks on your paid ads — from competitors, click farms and bots — that spend real budget with zero chance of a sale. Here's how it works, how to spot it, and what you can do today.

0–39 invalid40–69 suspicious70–100 clean
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Illustrative example — the same 0–100 score, per source, worst first.

Click fraud vs invalid traffic vs bot traffic

The terms overlap. Invalid traffic is the umbrella for any non-genuine ad interaction. Bot traffic is the automated portion of it. Click fraud is invalid traffic aimed specifically at pay-per-click ads — and it can be human (competitors, click farms) as well as automated. See what is invalid traffic and bot traffic detection.

Who does it, and why

  • Competitors — clicking your ads to burn your daily budget so theirs wins the auction.
  • Publishers / arbitrage — inflating click counts on inventory they get paid for.
  • Botnets & click farms — generating clicks at scale, often from datacenter or proxy networks.

The warning signs

High CTR with no conversions. Sessions that bounce instantly. Clusters of clicks from the same sources. ValidVisit turns each of these from a hunch into an auditable, defensible judgment on the specific click — every click weighed against 100+ independent data points and distilled into one 0–100 quality score.

What you can do today

Install one lightweight script, let ValidVisit weigh every click against 100+ independent data points — spanning the network it came from, the device behind it and how the visitor behaves — into a single 0–100 quality score, and read the per-source/per-publisher breakdown to cut the placements wasting your spend. For Google specifically, see Google Ads click fraud and competitor click fraud.

FAQ

What is click fraud?+
Click fraud is the practice of generating invalid clicks on pay-per-click ads with no genuine interest in the advertiser — to drain a competitor's budget, earn fraudulent publisher revenue, or simply by automated bots. It's the paid-ads subset of invalid traffic.
Who commits click fraud?+
Competitors clicking your ads to exhaust your budget; publishers or arbitrage operators inflating their own click counts; botnets and click farms operating at scale; and automated crawlers clicking indiscriminately.
What are the warning signs?+
A jump in clicks with no matching conversions, unusually high CTR, very short sessions, repeated clicks from the same networks or regions, and traffic that doesn't look like it's coming from real consumer devices.
How do I stop click fraud?+
Detect and score every click, attribute invalid clicks to the campaign and publisher sending them, and use that evidence to cut bad placements and document invalid-click disputes. ValidVisit does the detection, scoring and attribution; automated platform IP-exclusion is on our roadmap.

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