Last updated: June 25, 2025
Microsoft Ads, also called Bing Ads, faces heavy targeting from click fraud gangs and arbitrageurs. It’s crucial to monitor your ad clicks for fraud, especially if your ads run on the Audience Network or Search Partners. This article covers the basics of click fraud, how to spot it, and how to claim refunds from Microsoft Ads.
What is click fraud?
Imagine you run a website providing tourist information for your city or region. One way to monetize this site is through advertising. You sign up with an ad network like Microsoft Ads, register as a publisher, and get a publisher advertising account. This lets you display ads from other businesses on your site. When someone clicks an ad, the advertiser pays Microsoft Ads, which then shares the revenue with you.
As an honest publisher, this system works well, and advertisers appreciate the genuine visitors you send their way. However, criminals exploit this setup by posing as legitimate publishers and generating vast numbers of fake clicks on ads displayed on their scam websites. These fraudulent clicks are called click fraud and cost advertisers over USD 100 billion annually.
For more details, see our article What is click fraud?
How to detect click fraud?
In an ideal world, ad networks would reliably detect and block click fraud for you. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, so you need to make sure your ad budget isn’t wasted on fake clicks.
Detecting click fraud means understanding how criminals create fake clicks and the methods they use to avoid detection. A common tactic is to use bots-automated software that simulates people visiting websites and clicking ads. To make these bots appear genuine, criminals often route their traffic through anonymous residential proxies, making it look like the clicks come from real users browsing from home.
Building systems to detect such sophisticated fraud is complicated and costly. Most advertisers lack the expertise and resources to do this themselves. It’s much easier and more affordable to use a click fraud detection service like Polygraph.
Polygraph identifies which clicks are fraudulent, explains why they’re fake, tells you when they happened, and reveals who was behind them. More importantly, it prevents fake conversions-so Microsoft Ads stops optimizing toward bot traffic-and helps retrain the system to send you more real human visitors over time.
Don’t rely solely on Microsoft Ads to protect your ads. Microsoft Ads is a popular network for fraudsters, partly because their click fraud detection is, to put it mildly, less than ideal. Using Polygraph to monitor your clicks gives you peace of mind that your marketing budget is safeguarded.
How to get click fraud refunds from Microsoft Ads?
Microsoft Ads requires specific details before investigating your click fraud claim and issuing a refund. You need to provide the dates and times of the fake clicks, why you believe the clicks are fraudulent, and the IP addresses involved. It’s also important to include the IDs of the affected campaigns and which ad keywords were targeted.
Polygraph automatically compiles all this information for you in a downloadable CSV file, making it easy to submit your refund request.
You can send your refund claim via Microsoft Ads’ online chat support at https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en/support
We highly recommend asking your Microsoft Ads account manager to submit the refund request on your behalf.
In summary
Getting click fraud refunds from Microsoft Ads can be challenging without solid evidence to back up your claims.
Using a click fraud detection service like Polygraph provides all the proof you need to show how click fraud bots are draining your marketing budget.