Paid Advertising
Click Fraud (Invalid Traffic)
Clicks with no real interest — bots, scripts, or competitors burning your budget — which Google filters but never fully eliminates.
Definition
Click fraud, formally called invalid traffic, is clicks on your ads that come from no genuine buying interest — automated bots, repeat clicks, or bad actors like competitors. Google detects and filters much of it, crediting back charges it catches.
In depth
Not every click is a prospect. Some come from bots and scrapers, some from accidental double-taps, and some from people deliberately draining a budget. Google's systems flag a lot of this as invalid traffic, drop it before you're billed, or refund it after the fact — but the filtering isn't perfect, and you still pay a real cost per click on whatever slips through.
For a contractor on a tight ad budget, even a small leak hurts: dollars spent on a bot are dollars not spent reaching a homeowner with a real project. In competitive trades, repeated clicks from a rival can puff up your click-through rate while quietly inflating your cost per lead, making a solid campaign look like it's failing.
The mistake is either ignoring it or panicking and blaming every weak month on fraud. We monitor click patterns and IP-level activity, exclude suspicious sources, lean on Smart Bidding so bot clicks don't drive decisions, and rely on Google's invalid-traffic credits — keeping spend pointed at clicks that can actually become jobs.
Worked example
A contractor notices a spike of clicks with zero calls or form fills; flagged as invalid traffic, Google credits the charges and excluding the source stabilizes cost per lead.
Paid Advertising
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