# Click fraud (invalid clicks)

URL: https://tnb-tech.com/en/glossary/click-fraud/

## What is click fraud (invalid clicks)?

Click fraud, or invalid clicks, is paid advertising traffic with no real interest behind it: bots, automated tools, repeated clicks from the same person, or clicks from a competitor. Google catches much of it automatically, does not charge for those clicks, and reports them in a column you can add to a campaign report. What the filter misses shows up as spend with no enquiries and visits that end in seconds.

**Example**

A car parts shop spends €600 a month at €0.60 a click, so roughly 1,000 clicks. An invalid clicks column, added by hand to the campaign report, shows another 74 clicks filtered out and never charged. The real problem sits elsewhere: analytics shows 180 visits from a single network, all under five seconds, none of them reaching the basket. Paid at €0.60, those clicks cost about €108 a month — close to a fifth of the budget.

The check is ordinary arithmetic: clicks, visits, average time on page and enquiries, split by source, day and hour. Human traffic looks human — mixed devices, mixed hours, mixed behaviour.

**Why it matters for a business**

Invalid clicks take more than money; they distort decisions. When part of the traffic is fake, clickthrough rate looks healthy while the cost of an enquiry climbs for no visible reason. Campaigns that work get paused, and budget moves to a keyword that only burns it.

Clicks the filters catch drop out of the report and the bill before the invoice is issued, and invalid activity found later comes back as a credit on the next one. So “we were not charged” is not the same as “there is no problem”. The cases in between are the ones worth watching: a competitor clicking by hand, or a thin site in the display network earning from impressions.

**What to ask**

- How many invalid clicks has Google filtered in the last three months, and what share of spend is that?
- Are there IP addresses or networks with many clicks and no conversions, and have they been excluded?
- In display campaigns, which sites and apps produce the clicks, and which placements are excluded?
- Before a campaign is paused for poor results, how do we check whether its traffic was clean?On the campaigns we run in Google Ads, that check is part of the monthly report: filtered clicks, placements, and the searches that bring no enquiries.

- Services: [Google Ads](https://tnb-tech.com/en/services/google-ads/)
- Glossary: https://tnb-tech.com/en/glossary/