If you've run PPC ads for more than five minutes, you've probably seen this: tons of clicks, zero results. Great CTR, terrible conversions. It's maddening. And yeah, sometimes that's just bad targeting or a weak landing page. But a lot of the time, it's click fraud.

So what IS click fraud, really?

At its core, click fraud is when someone (or more often, something) clicks your ads with zero intention of ever becoming a customer. Bots, click farms, bored competitors, malware...the cast of characters is surprisingly large. The end result is always the same: you pay for clicks that never had a chance of turning into revenue.

Depending on your industry, anywhere from about 14% to over 20% of PPC clicks are fraudulent. If you're in a high-value niche like legal, home services or B2B software, the numbers can get even uglier. But before you can do anything about it, you need to understand one thing most advertisers never think about: how ad platforms actually track your clicks.

Here's the part that trips people up. Platforms like Google, Meta, and Microsoft Ads track clicks in two different ways. If you don't install any tracking code on your site, they just count the click on their end. Someone taps your ad? Boom - click recorded.

But if you do install their tracking code (pixel, tag, whatever they call it), they can see when someone actually lands on your site. The click ID gets passed through the URL, your page reads it, and the platform gets a "yes, this person really arrived" signal and you get charged for the click.

This matters because platforms trust arrival data WAY more than outbound click data. It's simply more accurate. And if you're running any kind of AI-optimized campaign, you basically have to give them that data. No pixel means no learning, no optimization, and no chance the algorithm figures out what a real customer looks like.

Why IP exclusions don't save you

Most platforms give you an IP exclusion list. Google lets you block up to 500 IPs per campaign. Sounds useful until you realize: 500 IPs is a drop in the ocean.

Fraud operations rotate through thousands of IPs. Mobile carriers and residential ISPs constantly shuffle them around. The IP that belonged to a bot yesterday might belong to a real customer today. And by the time you identify a bad IP, it's already eaten part of your budget.

And let's be honest: platforms get paid per click. They don't have a strong financial incentive to aggressively filter out junk traffic.

So what can you actually do?

Before you start shopping for third-party tools, there are a few things you can do right now:

  • Watch your analytics like a hawk. Sudden traffic spikes with no conversions, weirdly high bounce rates, or clicks from countries you don't serve are all red flags.
  • Use the IP exclusions you do have. It's limited, but blocking obvious data centers and VPN ranges still helps.
  • Tighten your targeting. On Google, turning off Search Partners or the Display Network can cut out a lot of low-quality traffic.
  • Adjust your ad schedule. If you're a local bakery, you probably don't need to run ads at 3:30 AM. Bots love the late-night hours.
  • Log visitor data on your own site. IPs, user agents, timestamps - anything that helps you spot patterns or file an invalid traffic claim later.

The big advantage of collecting data on your own landing pages is simple: you see everything. Every visitor, every behavior, in real time. You're not relying on the ad platform to police itself.

And honestly, that's the real foundation of fighting click fraud: knowing what's happening on your turf instead of trusting the platforms to protect your budget for you.

Next up

Now that you know what click fraud is and why the platforms can't stop it, the next question is: where should protection actually happen? We dig into client-side vs. platform-side click fraud protection and why most tools in the industry don't actually protect anything.