What Is Click Fraud in Google Ads? (Archive, 2020)

Recorded in September 2020 during Simon's s.media agency era and published as part of a dated historical record. It reflects the market then, not current advice.

How do you work out what percentage of clicks are real?

I was chatting today to a client, and they asked me: what percentage of my clicks are working? That's a reasonably easy thing to work out, because with Google Ads you can track cost per acquisition from a campaign — and Facebook the same, or cost per sale — as long as you've got Google Tag Manager installed. You can track the moment the click event happens.

Quite a useful setup is: landing page view first, then the first action — which might be add to cart or entering details — then, if there's a form, the form fill, and the actual conversion action may well be the submit button at the end.

Why are bots spending your money?

One thing you've got to be mindful of: there are an awful lot of bots out there clicking forms and spending your money as an advertiser. It's typically 20 to 25 per cent of the traffic out there, particularly on Facebook. If you've got Facebook campaigns that aren't performing, check the amount of fraud coming through on your account — it's reasonably easy to do. If your agency isn't putting a click barrier in place to stop fraudulent clicks, they're probably wasting a quarter of your ad spend. I've seen it as high as 50 per cent.

What happens if you don't block it?

The real problem, if you're not blocking fraudulent clicks, is that your campaigns will begin to optimise for the fraudulent click. There are a lot of bots now that will fill in forms on people's websites deliberately, to give the signal that a conversion event has happened — and therefore Facebook, Google and the rest serve more of your ads to bots, and a bigger percentage of your spend goes on bot clicks rather than the real clicks you're trying to get.

Put a tool in place to stop the fraudulent clicks. That lets you spend the money that would have gone on fraud on the correct actions and acquiring the correct customer — and it's exponential, like rolling up a snowball. Once you start optimising for the correct event and not a bot click, I've seen campaigns treble or quadruple in effectiveness through simple techniques like stopping fraud on the account.