Click Fraud
Click fraud uses bots or paid clickers to fake ad clicks and impressions — draining advertiser budgets and inflating publisher or affiliate revenue.
Stop Click Fraud
Protect your ad spend from fraudulent clicks
What is Click Fraud?
Click fraud is generating clicks on paid advertising that have no chance of becoming a customer. The advertiser pays per click, so a click that was never a person is money taken directly.
It persists because it is profitable for whoever is paid for the traffic, and because detecting it requires data the advertiser frequently cannot see.
Who does it, and why
| Actor | Motive |
|---|---|
| Publisher operating fake inventory | Paid per click or impression on their own placements |
| Competitor | Exhausting a rival's daily budget, so their ads stop showing |
| Affiliate fraudster | Claiming commission for conversions they did not cause |
| Botnet operator | Selling click traffic as a service to any of the above |
Competitor-driven fraud is the one advertisers underestimate. It does not need volume to work — exhausting a budget by mid-morning takes a modest number of clicks and removes you from the auction for the rest of the day.
How it shows up in your own data
You will usually see it in analytics before any platform tells you:
- Clicks with near-zero time on page, at a rate well above your normal bounce
- A click volume spike with no matching change in conversions
- Traffic concentrated in a few placements, networks or regions you do not sell into
- Click-through rates far above plausible for the creative, which is the tell for a publisher inflating its own inventory
- A pattern of repeat clicks that stops abruptly at a daily budget ceiling
Attribution gaps make this harder than it should be. If the ad platform both sells the clicks and adjudicates which were invalid, you are relying on a measurement made by the party being paid.
What actually reduces it
The platforms do filter, and refund some invalid traffic — treat that as a floor rather than a solution. What you control:
- Exclude placements aggressively. Run display on an allowlist rather than relying on exclusions, if the campaign allows it.
- Verify on your own property. A bot layer on the landing page tells you how much arriving paid traffic is automated, independently of the platform's own accounting.
- Measure to a business event, not a click. Optimise and report on completed sign-ups or purchases, and fraudulent clicks become visible as a cost with no matching outcome.
- Protect the conversion action. Fake form fills and fake signups are what turn click fraud into corrupted conversion data, which is more expensive than the wasted click because it misdirects your bidding.
Prosopo's part is the second and fourth of those: identifying whether a person is behind the session that arrived, and stopping automated submissions on the form at the end of it.