Click spam

What is click spam and ad click spam

In essence, click spam is a situation in which fraudulent or artificial clicking activity generates clicks that don’t represent genuine user interest. It can involve bots, automated scripts, or other forms of manipulated traffic.

Ad click spam is a more specific form of this activity: fraudulent clicks directed at ad units. These clicks are considered invalid traffic because they don’t come from genuine user interest. Platforms such as Google use multiple signals to detect suspicious activity rather than judging individual clicks in isolation. These signals can include traffic patterns, user behavior, and other characteristics of the requests. When an activity is identified as invalid, Google may filter clicks, withhold related revenue, limit ad serving, or take further action, depending on the circumstances.

Types of ad click spam

Let’s take a look at types of ad click spam:

• Self-clicking and other manually generated invalid clicks: site owners interacting with their own live ad units (as a quick reminder: you should never click your own live ads, even if just to test if they are working!). The other scenario involves external human visitors manually generating invalid traffic. This can happen for several reasons: for example, a competitor intentionally trying to deplete an advertiser’s daily budget, or a visitor repeatedly clicking an ad without genuine interest;
• Accidental clicks: occur when real users click ads by accident. Of course, mistakes happen, but too many “accidents” might signal a problem. A high number of accidental clicks can be linked to aggressive ad placements or layout shifts (measured by Cumulative Layout Shift, or CLS, one of Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics). Picture this: your reader is highly engaged, scrolling down to tap “Read More”, but right at that exact millisecond, a banner ad drops down. Suddenly, instead of reading your brilliant recipe, they are looking at a landing page for car insurance. They immediately hit the “back” button. This is incredibly frustrating for the user, entirely worthless for the advertiser, and ultimately toxic for your long-term ad revenue. Additionally, Google strictly prohibits publishers from encouraging visitors to click on advertisements under any circumstances. Prompting your audience with phrases like “click here to support us” or placing misleading labels above ad blocks violates Google Publisher Policies. Disclaimer: accidental clicks aren’t necessarily fraudulent, but they can still contribute to invalid traffic!;
• Non-human traffic: this is what industry specialists mostly discuss when speaking about ad fraud. They primarily refer to automated software programs, such as bots, and click farms. These programs are engineered to load your web pages and click on your links. On the surface, some automated traffic can look very similar to ordinary human behavior. That’s why detecting fraudulent traffic isn’t as simple as checking where it comes from. Bots and other sources of invalid traffic can originate from data centers, cloud providers, proxies, VPNs, mobile networks, or even compromised residential devices. Detection therefore relies on multiple signals, such as traffic patterns, request frequency, device characteristics, IP reputation, and user behavior.

Quick reminder: in the second case mentioned above (when the company believes there are too many accidental clicks), Google sometimes imposes Confirmed Click, a misclick prevention technique that displays a screen with a message, requiring the user to confirm that he really wants to proceed. If you are interested in learning more, we recommend our article titled “Ad misclick and Confirmed Click”.

Ad fraud prevention and how to fight ad click spam

Every publisher should know that Google believes you are responsible for invalid traffic on your ads.

• Please – do not click your ads! Google strictly forbids this practice. When you click your own ad units, the system classifies it as invalid traffic. Even if you think those clicks are just being filtered out of your daily reporting, Google is actively recording the activity;
• Before collaborating with any third-party directory, search engine, or ad network, it’s wise to read Google’s traffic provider checklist. Educating yourself on how traffic purchasing works is also important. If you skip this research, you risk partnering with low-quality providers and thus encountering issues with invalid traffic;
• To protect your ad revenue, you must know exactly who is visiting your website. Understanding your standard audience data is the most effective way to identify fraudulent activity before it damages your account. Try logging into your Google Analytics account and segment your traffic reports by URL channels, user devices, and geographic locations. Look for any anomalies like:
  • massive, sudden spikes in traffic volume within a very short time frame,
  • users moving through your pages in illogical, non-human patterns;
• If you detect suspicious behavior, act! Investigate the source and, where appropriate, block or filter clearly abusive traffic. However, don’t rely on IP blocking alone, as fraudulent traffic can come from constantly changing or shared IP addresses.

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