Last updated: 18 June 2025
Click fraud wastes billions yearly, but many ‘protection’ tools don't work as advertised. We’ll expose three common solutions that fail to deliver and share what actually works to safeguard your ad spend.
What is click fraud?
Click fraud is an online scam that artificially increases the number of ad clicks, stealing from advertisers’ budgets with the money going to criminals. Here’s how it works:
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Criminals establish what appears to be a legitimate publishing operation and apply for publisher accounts through major advertising networks like Google Ads or Microsoft Ads. Once approved, these fraudsters gain the ability to display authentic advertisements. Each time these ads are clicked, advertisers pay the network for the click, and the network shares a portion of this revenue with the publisher - in this case, the scammer.
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The criminal hires a bot programmer to develop a specialized click fraud bot which repeatedly visits the scammer's website and clicks on the ads displayed. The bot perfectly mimics real human behaviour, tricking advertising networks into registering these fake interactions as legitimate clicks. The programmer incorporates advanced tools to make the bot's digital footprint indistinguishable from an actual person's browser. Additionally, they employ residential proxy services that provide a fresh, geographically diverse IP address for each visit, ensuring no patterns emerge that might reveal the fraudulent activity.
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The bots create fake conversions on advertisers' websites, making the fraudulent clicks appear even more legitimate to advertising networks. This sophisticated deception, known as conversion fraud, represents an advanced layer of click fraud manipulation.
This sophisticated scheme is not isolated: 100s of thousands of fraudulent publishers employ these tactics, draining over $100 billion from advertisers annually.
How to detect click fraud
Before we discuss click fraud detection gimmicks, let's explain the correct way to detect and prevent click fraud.
The first step is to inspect every ad click to determine whether it came from a real person or a bot. The Polygraph click fraud detection service does this automatically, using a series of invisible challenges that expose fake visitors.
Once a fake click is identified, Polygraph disables the bots behind it, preventing them from generating any conversions—like fake lead submissions. Since the ad networks send you traffic which looks like your converting traffic, this retrains the ad networks to deliver higher-quality human traffic instead of bots.
Additionally, detailed click fraud data can be submitted to your advertising network to request refunds for invalid clicks.
Polygraph uses the above techniques to detect and prevent click fraud.
Click fraud detection gimmicks
The first common gimmick is trying to prevent click fraud through IP address blocking. While Google Ads allows you to block up to 500 IP addresses from viewing or clicking your ads, this approach misunderstands how modern click fraud operates. As previously explained, click fraud bots use proxy services that provide a new IP address for every click. This means most blocked IPs will never be used again, making this method completely ineffective at reducing your click fraud risk. You can read more in our full article: Why blocking IP addresses won't protect your ads from click fraud.
The second gimmick involves automatically pausing ad campaigns when click fraud is detected, which should frustrate bots into moving onto a different target. This ignores the reality that click fraud bots are automated programs that don't react to paused campaigns: they will simply continue clicking whenever your ads are active again.
A third ineffective approach is flagging all VPN traffic as fraudulent. While some fraudsters use VPNs, many legitimate users do, too. Proper click fraud detection should detect actual bots rather than making assumptions based on the use of a VPN.
In summary
Effective click fraud protection requires
- Accurate bot detection
- Real-time bot blocking
- Retraining of ad networks to improve traffic quality
- Audience exclusions to block bots from seeing ads
- Detailed fraud data for refund claims
Ineffective gimmicks to avoid:
- IP address blocking
- Pausing ad campaigns
- Blocking all VPN traffic
Why Polygraph works
- Detects fake clicks using science-backed methods
- Blocks bots in real-time to prevent fake conversions
- Retrains the ad networks to send humans instead of bots
- Prevents bot devices from seeing your ads
- Provides detailed fraud data for refund claims
- Avoids gimmicks like IP blocking and VPN blacklisting
- Protects your budget by focusing only on real users
Polygraph understands the reality of click fraud, and sticks to the science when it comes to detecting and preventing click fraud. Protect your ads from click fraud today.