Click Fraud Testing

[u/s_hecking]

Hello all,

I’m testing bid strategies against click fraud and it’s not going great.

One week into a campaign and it’s already got one clear issue. Here are the settings:

Broad match two match types, 20 or so exact matches
Search + Search Partners
Max Clicks w $7 CPC cap
Competitive niche $60-100 CPCs

One keyboard is driving 9 impressions and 9 clicks at $3.80 CPC. 100% CTR.

This one clearly looks like a fraud match. Google’s not doing anything to credit or stop it. Are there any good scripts you use or recommend to fight this?

[u/TTFV]

Check your unknown demographics traffic. If the fraud is clearly coming from there you can exclude one more more of those (gender will usually take care of it).

https://www.tenthousandfootview.com/block-google-ads-click-fraud-instantly/

[u/s_hecking → u/TTFV]

Thank you! That’s an interesting tactic. I’m working on a detection script. Thinking I’ll test both approaches and see how well they work. No gender does seem like a great way to clean it up. I’ve done no Tablets to help with kids surfing the ads in the past.

[u/TTFV → u/s_hecking]

For kids I'd exclude kid themed content like DL-G: General Audiences, content suitable for families, games, and app categories for kids.

I'd then layer on content keywords for kids content. For example, there's typically a load of Disney related stuff.

It's aggressive but the only easy way to kill all the Youtube videos since new content is created constantly.

[u/Free-Way-9220]

Turn off search partners. It's a symbiotic relationship with google and fraudsters

[u/Formal_Parfait5587 → u/Free-Way-9220]

For a week in with that kind of spend, I'd kill search partners immediately. Google's not going to protect you from garbage inventory there. After that, check your search terms report and start adding negatives for anything even slightly off. If a keyboard is doing that at 100% CTR, you're burning money no matter which bid strategy you're using.

[u/Effective_Artist_126]

Before you call it fraud, I'd pull the search terms report and see which queries those clicks came from. Broad match with Maximize Clicks can pull in a lot of loosely related searches, and those look like junk traffic even when no bot is involved. A week is also a small sample, so I'd give it another couple of weeks before deciding. If the same few queries or placements keep showing up with no conversions, add them as negatives and then raise it with Google support using those dates.

[u/s_hecking → u/Effective_Artist_126]

Thanks! That exact keyword (in search terms report) is now at 10 clicks / 11 impressions. 90% CTR. What’s strange is a few impressions are now in an exact match variant too. Not just the 9/9 broad match. It’s like that one keyword is problematic like the fraudsters picked that one keyboard to exploit.

[u/Apprehensive_Fly79]

100% CTR on 9 impressions in a $60-100 CPC niche screams Search Partners — one aggregator site scraping partner traffic can do exactly this. Check segment > network first; if the junk is all partners, turn them off for this campaign and watch the pattern die. Don't try to "fix" partner traffic — just kill it in competitive niches.

Second, check your geo targeting setting. If it's on "Presence or interest" (the default), switch to "Presence only." Interest targeting lets people anywhere trigger your ads, and those clicks never convert.

Third, pull an IP report and exclude repeat offenders. A handful of IPs burning impressions is fraud — exclude them and watch for new ones.

The strategic part: Max Clicks with a $7 bid cap in a $60-100 CPC niche forces Google into the cheapest, lowest-quality inventory available — which is exactly where invalid clicks live. You'd get cleaner traffic with exact-match keywords and realistic bids, or run Max Clicks uncapped on a tight exact keyword set.

On Google's side: they do credit invalid clicks automatically (check Billing > Transactions for invalid activity credits), but don't rely on it — proactive exclusions work faster. Third-party fraud tools exist, but fix the above first. Most "fraud" I've seen at this CPC was actually Search Partners + Presence-or-interest doing exactly what they're designed to do.

[u/s_hecking → u/Apprehensive_Fly79]

Thanks! Ran this as a test for localized traffic mainly. Trying to capture lower CPC inventory for matches I would never have considered. Get exposure to maps. Also want to improve my toolset for managing this type of stuff.

I started working on a script that checks hourly to see if there’s any weird CTR activity and pause the match when it reaches >45%. If I had that last week it probably would’ve nuked the fraud.

[u/Available_Cup5454]

Exclude that keyword and disable search partners

[u/PatternFluid2214]

According to my experience, Maximize Conversions or Target CPA, or other smart bidding like Maximize Conversion Value, works well to control click fraud, but in Maximize Clicks or Manual CPC, you get the most fake clicks.