Most merchants find out about click fraud the hard way: cost-per-acquisition creeps up, conversion rate drifts down, and nothing in the campaign settings explains why.
Where invalid clicks come from
Invalid clicks land in a campaign from a handful of common sources:
- Competitor click bombing: scripted clicks meant to burn a rival’s daily budget
- Bot traffic scraping the web: automated crawlers that follow ad links as part of broader scraping
- Click farms: low-cost human or semi-automated click generation, often overseas
- Malformed or accidental clicks: double-clicks, pre-rendered pages, and other noise that isn’t fraud but still isn’t a real visitor
Why platform-side filtering isn’t enough
Google, Meta, and TikTok all claim to filter invalid clicks automatically, and they do catch the obvious cases. But their filtering happens without visibility into your specific storefront behavior. A click that looks fine in aggregate can still belong to a session that never scrolls, never hovers a product, and bounces in under a second.
Closing the loop
The fix is to attribute each ad click to the session it produces, score that session the same way you’d score checkout traffic, and suppress reporting back to the ad platform when the session is invalid. That keeps your optimization signal clean, so the algorithm stops learning to chase bots, instead of just filtering after the money is already spent.