Click Fraud

Click Fraud, or clicking, is the deliberate imitation of clicks on advertisements without real interest in the product. Sources: competitors (manually or through scripts), botnets, click farms, unscrupulous publishers in advertising networks.

In my practice, click-through is a real problem in niches with high competition and expensive traffic: legal services (CPC 200–400 RUR), plastic clinics, real estate. Symptoms: a sharp increase in clicks without an increase in conversions, abnormal peaks in traffic during non-working hours, high bounce rate (80%+) with normal landing.

Google and Yandex officially filter some invalid clicks and return money - this can be seen in the “Invalid Clicks” report in Direct and Invalid Clicks in Google Ads. But the filtering is incomplete: according to various estimates, 10–30% of clicks pass through automatic filters. For additional protection, I use services like ClickCease or internal rules in Direct - blocking by IP ranges and devices with abnormal behavior.

What really helps: limiting the geography of impressions to specific cities, limiting the frequency of impressions per user, monitoring UTM parameters in conjunction with Metrica. It is impossible to completely eliminate clicking, but it is possible to reduce losses to 2–3% of the budget.