Click Fraud and Bot Traffic: Is It Draining Your Ads Budget?
You check your Google Ads account and see a spike in clicks overnight, but no enquiries came in. Your first thought is probably "has someone been clicking my ads on purpose?" It is a fair question, and the honest answer is: probably a bit, yes, but it is rarely the whole story. Let's go through what click fraud actually is, how much of it is realistic for a local service business, and the practical checks you can do this week without hiring anyone.
What click fraud and bot traffic actually mean
Click fraud is any click on your ad that does not come from someone genuinely interested in what you do. That covers several different things, and it matters which one you have because the fix is different:
- Bots: automated software that crawls the web and sometimes clicks on ads, often from data centre IP addresses rather than homes or offices.
- Competitor clicks: a rival business, or someone they have asked, clicking your ad repeatedly to burn through your daily budget.
- Click farms: low-paid workers, often overseas, clicking ads for small payments as part of a scam network.
- Accidental or junk clicks: people misclicking on mobile, or clicking out of simple curiosity with zero buying intent.
Google already runs automatic filters that catch a portion of this before you are ever charged, and it labels what it catches as "invalid clicks" in your account. The uncomfortable truth, confirmed by independent researchers, is that Google's own filters only catch an estimated 40 to 60 percent of genuine invalid traffic. The rest gets billed, and worse, it can quietly train your Smart Bidding algorithm to chase the wrong kind of visitor.
How common is it, realistically
There is no single clean number here, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But the published ranges for 2025 and 2026 are fairly consistent:
A sensible planning assumption for a typical local service account is 8 to 15 percent of spend being recoverable waste once you tidy things up, with a further 3 to 7 percent recovered over the following months. So if you spend £1,500 a month on Google Ads, somewhere between £120 and £300 of that could plausibly be going nowhere. That is worth fixing, but it is not usually the reason your campaign "isn't working." Weak landing pages and broad targeting waste far more money than fraud does for most small accounts.
The warning signs to actually look for
Before you assume fraud, rule out the boring explanations first: broad match keywords pulling in irrelevant searches, a slow landing page, or broken conversion tracking. If those check out, here is what genuine invalid traffic tends to look like:
- Clicks with no engagement: visits that last under 5 seconds, view one page, and leave. In Google Analytics, look for an engagement rate close to zero on a cluster of sessions.
- Clicks from outside your service area: if you are a plumber in Leeds, a run of clicks from overseas or from cities you do not serve is a red flag.
- Clicks in sudden, repeated bursts: several clicks within minutes on your best performing keyword, at odd hours, rather than spread naturally across the day.
- A handful of IP addresses doing all the damage: often 20 to 50 addresses responsible for a disproportionate share of clicks, sometimes rotating but from the same hosting provider (Amazon, DigitalOcean, OVH and similar data centre ranges are common culprits).
- A growing gap between Google Ads conversions and your actual enquiries: compare your CRM or inbox lead count to what Google Ads reports. A gap of more than 15 percent month on month is worth investigating.
What you can check this week, yourself
You do not need software to do a basic health check. In your Google Ads account:
- Go to Campaigns, then add the "Invalid clicks" and "Invalid click rate" columns to see what Google has already filtered.
- Check your Locations report for any clicks arriving from places you do not serve, then exclude them.
- Review your Search Terms report weekly and add irrelevant searches as negative keywords. This single habit does more to protect your budget than almost anything else.
- If you run Performance Max, check the Placements report for Display-style websites with high clicks and zero conversions, and add them to your exclusion list.
- In Google Ads Settings, under IP exclusions, you can manually block specific IP addresses once you have evidence they are generating repeated, low quality clicks. Note that IP addresses are often shared, so only exclude ones you have real evidence against.
Should you pay for a click fraud tool
Third party tools like ClickCease, Fraud Blocker and Lunio monitor clicks in real time and automatically add suspicious IPs to your exclusion list, which is more reliable than doing it manually. They typically cost somewhere between £30 and £150 a month depending on traffic volume.
Worth the subscription? If you are spending over roughly £1,500 to £2,000 a month on Google Ads and operate in a competitive or high value trade (conveyancing solicitors, cosmetic dentists, or anyone with a job value well above £500), yes. Below that spend level, the manual checks above combined with tight location targeting and solid negative keyword management will usually get you most of the way there without an extra subscription.
What Google will and will not refund
Google does not hand out cash refunds for invalid traffic. Clicks it catches before your bill closes are simply removed from your invoice. Anything it catches after you have been billed appears as a credit labelled "Invalid activity" on your next statement. If you believe you have been hit by a sustained, deliberate attack, you can submit a Click Quality Investigation request through Google Ads support with timestamps, IP addresses and GCLID data, though the process can be slow and Google is understandably cautious about what it classes as fraud versus ordinary traffic variation.
The bigger picture
Click fraud is real, and worth a monthly 20 minute check. But for most local service businesses, the bigger budget drain is usually something more fixable: keywords that are too broad, a landing page that does not clearly explain what you offer or make it easy to enquire, or tracking that is not set up correctly in the first place. Fix those basics first, then layer in fraud protection once you are confident the fundamentals are solid.
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