Click Fraud: Why Part of Your Budget Never Converts
Click fraud can look like a normal month with a poor conversion rate. Yet, for online retailers, it's one of the most expensive items in the budget – and one of the easiest to fix.
Clicks are up, the budget's gone, sales are lagging. So you tweak the feed, bids, and images.
But sometimes, it's because some clicks never intended to buy: bots, click farms, competitors.
Here's how to spot that and manage both sides of your cost per click.
How to spot click fraud in your account
The CPC won't show anything amiss because the auction runs normally. It's the figures behind it that stand out.
- Conversion Rate drops, CPC stays the same: more visits, same number of orders.
- Sessions with no time on site: straight in, no scrolling, immediately gone.
- Click spikes at night or weekends: without a corresponding increase in sales.
- Always the same products: usually the most expensive ones.
One signal alone means nothing. Several over weeks are a good reason to investigate there, rather than in your feed.
Who's clicking
- 1Bots and price crawlers: extracting prices and availability. For you, it's a paid click with no buyer.
- 2Click farms: many clicks from a few networks, seconds apart, with no interaction.
- 3Competitors: recurring clicks from the same source, always on the same products.
Why retailers lose more
Product clicks are expensive, retail margins are slim, and if you're high up in price comparisons, you'll be watched. Every invalid click quickly turns into lost money.
| Factor | What it means |
|---|---|
| High CPCs | each worthless click costs many times over |
| Visibility in price comparison | crawlers and competitors find you first |
| Thin margins | one point of conversion rate eats into profit |
| Many SKUs | losses are spread out and noticed too late |
What you can check in 15 minutes
- 1Compare campaigns: where has the conversion rate dropped without reason?
- 2Look at times of day: clicks without sales overnight are a pattern.
- 3Open the location report: clicks from regions you don't ship to.
- 4Check devices: a combination that clicks a lot and never buys.
That's enough to know if you have a traffic problem. It's not enough to fix it permanently: IP addresses change faster than you can block them.
- Free Google CSS migration
- Full visibility in Google Shopping
- 20% lower click prices
- 21 EU markets included
- Premium email support
- No minimum term
How to stop it
Click fraud protection checks every ad visit in real-time and automatically adds suspicious IP addresses to your Google Ads account exclusion list. In Standard Shopping, the ad will then simply stop showing.
In Performance Max and Smart Shopping, Google doesn't allow IP lists per campaign. There, the account-wide block applies, and you receive a report on invalid clicks, which can be used to justify refunds.
- Setup: a script in your shop, templates for Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento.
- Runtime: after about two weeks, detection works reliably.
- Campaigns: remain unchanged.
The second lever: Google CSS
Stopping invalid clicks is half the battle. The other half is the price of valid clicks: with Google CSS, you pay around 20% less per click, for the same bid and campaign.
With us, this costs £17 per month, and click fraud protection is an optional add-on. Both work on the same clicks: cheaper, and only for visits that can actually buy.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much click fraud is normal?
That depends on your industry and visibility. Reliable measurement is only possible within your own account, not an average figure.
Doesn't Google detect this themselves?
Some of it, yes, which is credited as an invalid click. Patterns that behave like real users get through.
Does the protection work in Performance Max?
Detection and account-wide blocking yes, Google doesn't allow IP lists per campaign there. The report remains as proof.
Do I need to restructure my campaigns?
No. Structure, bidding strategy, and feed remain unchanged.
What does Google CSS have to do with this?
CSS lowers your CPC by around 20%, while the protection prevents you from paying for worthless clicks at all.
When will I see a difference?
You'll see the CSS savings from the first auction, and the effect of the protection after about two weeks.
- Free Google CSS migration
- Full visibility in Google Shopping
- 20% lower click prices
- 21 EU markets included
- Premium email support
- No minimum term