How to protect your PPC campaigns from click fraud in 2026

To protect PPC campaigns from click fraud, start with what Google Ads already does (automatic invalid click filtering and credits), then tighten the account: IP exclusions, precise geo-targeting, ad scheduling, placement exclusions and search term reviews. Add a third-party tool such as ClickCease, Lunio or CHEQ when monthly spend or fraud exposure justifies it. Judge fraud by conversion quality, not by click counts or search volume.

How to protect PPC campaigns from click fraud: the short answer

Most accounts can cut their exposure to click fraud with five controls that cost nothing but time.

1. Add the invalid clicks and invalid click rate columns in Google Ads and check them weekly.
2. Exclude IP addresses, locations, placements and search terms that produce clicks and no enquiries.
3. Schedule ads for the hours real customers convert, and geo-fence campaigns to the areas you serve.
4. Run a brand campaign 24/7 and file a trademark complaint against anyone using your name in ad copy.
5. Add ClickCease, Lunio or CHEQ once spend or exposure justifies it, and measure the result in lead quality, not blocked clicks.

The rest of this guide covers each control, compares the three main tools, sets out the enterprise options available in Australia, and explains how to deal with scammers who bid on your business name.

What click fraud looks like in 2026

Click fraud is any click on a paid ad made without genuine interest in the offer. It costs you twice: once in wasted spend, and again in the corrupted data that Smart Bidding and your own reporting then learn from. It takes six forms.

Bot clicks. Automated scripts load your ad and click it, either to drain your budget or to generate revenue for a publisher. Modern bots move the mouse, scroll the page and sometimes fill forms, so a click alone no longer tells you much.

Competitor clicks. A rival, or someone working for them, clicks your ads to exhaust your daily budget early and take the impression share you leave behind. This is most damaging in categories where a single click costs more than a coffee round, such as legal, insurance and trades emergencies.

Publisher fraud. Sites on the Display Network earn a share of every click. Some inflate that income by clicking their own placements, hiring people to do it, or running bots against them. High click-through rates with no conversions on a display placement are the usual sign.

Fake impressions. Bots load pages to inflate impressions on CPM-priced display inventory, or to bury your search ad’s click-through rate under impressions that were never seen by a person. Either way the metrics you optimise against are wrong.

Ad impersonation. Someone runs ads using your business name in the headline or display path, often pointing at a lookalike site or a lead-resale page. Customers searching for you land somewhere else and you pay to win them back.

Conversion fraud. Bots submit your lead forms with fake names, disposable email addresses and dead phone numbers. Your account reports conversions, Smart Bidding chases more of them, and your sales team wastes hours chasing ghosts.

What Google Ads already does about invalid clicks

Google filters invalid clicks automatically, removes them from your billing and reports them in the invalid clicks and invalid click rate columns. Google’s help documentation states that you are not charged for invalid clicks or impressions, and that where invalid clicks are detected after billing you receive a credit on your next invoice where appropriate and possible.

To see what Google has already caught, open Columns, then Modify columns, then Performance, and add Invalid clicks and Invalid click rate. A rising rate at campaign or keyword level is your first signal that something has changed. Check it weekly and note any spikes against the changes you made that week, because a new broad match keyword or a bid increase will move these numbers without any fraud involved.

Beyond the automatic filtering, Google gives you four controls.

IP exclusions. You can exclude up to 500 IP addresses per campaign under Settings, Additional settings, IP exclusions, and there is also an account-level list under Admin, Account settings. Google’s documentation notes that IP exclusions are not available for video, hotel, app, Performance Max or Smart Display campaigns, so this control only reaches your Search, Shopping and standard Display campaigns.

Location and schedule. Precise geotargeting in Google Ads keeps your ads inside the suburbs and regions you serve, and ad scheduling keeps them out of the hours when nobody at your business can answer the phone. Both shrink the surface a fraudster can hit.

Placement and search term exclusions. Review the placement report on display campaigns and the search terms report on search campaigns every week. Exclude any placement that produces clicks with no engagement, and add negative keywords for terms that have nothing to do with your service.

The click quality investigation. If you believe invalid clicks are getting through, submit Google’s click quality form. Google’s specialists review traffic from the last 60 days and the process takes several business days. Have ready your customer ID, the exact date range, the campaign and ad group names, any IP addresses that click repeatedly, the GCLIDs of suspicious clicks and a plain description of the pattern. Google will tell you the outcome, but it will not confirm whether specific clicks were marked valid or invalid, because that would help the people it is filtering.

What Google will not do is block a human competitor who clicks your ad once a day from their phone on a mobile network. That click is indistinguishable from a customer, and it is the gap third-party tools try to fill.

Click fraud detection tools compared: ClickCease, Lunio and CHEQ

All three detect and block invalid clicks on Google Ads, and they differ on platform coverage, detection method and enterprise fit. PPC Protect, which the earlier version of this guide named, rebranded as Lunio, and the comparison below uses the features each vendor describes on its own site as checked on 17/09/2026. Pricing changes often and is left out on purpose.

	ClickCease	Lunio	CHEQ
Detection method	Rule-based click thresholds you set, plus behavioural checks on each click and landing page session, with VPN and proxy detection	Machine learning that scores every click as legitimate, suspicious or invalid using click, context and conversion data, cookieless	Layered analysis: network request analysis, TCP/IP fingerprinting, device and browser spoofing detection and behavioural analysis
Automatic IP and device blocking	Automatic IP and user exclusions pushed to Google, Meta and Microsoft Ads	IP exclusions at campaign and account level, plus custom audience exclusions on platforms with no IP blocking	Automated response across paid campaigns, plus form protection and analytics filtering
Platforms covered	Google Ads, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Microsoft Ads	Google, Microsoft, Meta and other paid search, paid social, display and Performance Max integrations, plus affiliate fraud prevention	Paid campaigns across ad platforms, web analytics, lead forms and third-party tag governance
Reporting depth	Click-level dashboard showing browser, timestamp, location and keyword for each click	Click-level analytics by location, keyword and placement, with traffic quality tracked over time	Product dashboards for acquisition, analytics, forms and tags
Enterprise features	Google and Meta API-approved integration. No SSO, API access or data residency stated on its site	ISO 27001 and SOC badges, TAG and IAB membership shown on its site	API and integrations, SSO, SOC 2 and ISO certification, GDPR and CCPA compliance stated
Best fit	Small and mid-sized search and social accounts that want simple automatic blocking	Multi-platform accounts where conversion data should inform what gets blocked	Enterprise accounts that want one vendor across ads, analytics, forms and tags

Can ClickCease automatically block IPs and devices?

Yes. ClickCease pushes flagged IP addresses to your Google Ads exclusion lists automatically, within Google’s 500 per campaign cap, and does the equivalent on Meta and Microsoft Ads by excluding users as well as addresses. You set how many times one IP can click before it is blocked, and you can block any click that arrives through a VPN or proxy. Each click is also run through the vendor’s behavioural checks on the landing page session, so repeat visitors on a fresh address can still be caught.

Its dashboard lists every flagged click with the browser, timestamp, location and keyword behind it, which is enough to see where the traffic comes from. Where any tool reports a “budget protected” total, treat it as the vendor’s estimate: it assumes every blocked click would otherwise have been charged, and Google may already have filtered a share of them for free.

The best options for click fraud detection in enterprise PPC in Australia

For enterprise paid search and paid social accounts in Australia, the options are CHEQ and Lunio, and for programmatic and display the accredited verification vendors are DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. Both of those verification platforms measure invalid traffic, viewability and brand suitability across open web, video and connected TV, and DoubleVerify displays TAG Certified Against Fraud status on its site. The right choice depends less on detection claims than on how the tool fits your stack.

Select on these criteria:

• Multi-platform coverage. One vendor across Google, Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn and programmatic, so blocking rules and reporting are consistent.
• Accreditation. Media Rating Council accreditation for invalid traffic detection, or TAG Certified Against Fraud status, for anything touching programmatic spend.
• API and warehouse export. Click-level data you can pull into BigQuery, Snowflake or your own reporting, not only a dashboard.
• Data residency and privacy. Where the click data is stored, and whether the vendor’s handling meets your obligations under the Australian Privacy Act.
• Security certification. ISO 27001 or SOC 2, with the certificate available on request.
• Support in Australian hours. A vendor whose support desk opens as Perth closes will cost you a day on every incident.
• Integration with GA4 and your CRM. The tool has to tell you what happened to the leads it let through, or you cannot judge whether it is helping.

For marketing analytics at large enterprises, add a filtering layer below the ad platforms. GA4 excludes traffic from known bots and spiders automatically, using Google’s own research and the IAB International Spiders and Bots List, and that exclusion cannot be switched off. CHEQ Analytics and similar products go further by scoring the traffic GA4 lets through, and a customer data platform can apply the same scoring before a record reaches the CRM.

How to block PPC scams that use your business name

You cannot stop competitors bidding on your business name as a keyword, but you can stop them using it in their ad text through a Google Ads trademark complaint, and you can outrank impersonators with a 24/7 brand campaign. Google’s trademark policy allows trademarks as keywords, and it will act on complaints where a trademark appears in a direct competitor’s ad text or is used in a confusing or misleading way. Resellers and informational pages are the stated exceptions.

Spot the impersonation. Search your own brand from an incognito window, on both desktop and mobile, at different times of day. Open Auction Insights on your brand campaign to see who is competing for those terms and how often they outrank you. Set an alert for your business name and check who is advertising against it each week.

File the trademark complaint. If your name is a registered trademark, use Google’s trademark complaint process and reference the registration. Google reviews the ad and restricts the use of the mark in ad text where the policy is breached. This does not remove the competitor from the auction, so keep reading.

Report scam and phishing ads. Ads that pretend to be you and lead to a fake site are a policy matter, not a trademark one. Report them through Google’s ad reporting form with the URL of the landing page and screenshots. These are usually removed faster than trademark cases.

Check your affiliate and reseller agreements. If you allow partners to advertise your products, state in writing whether they may bid on your brand and whether they may use it in ad copy. Many “impersonators” turn out to be resellers who were never told.

Run a brand campaign that never sleeps. Your own brand campaign should run 24/7 with exact and phrase match on your name and its common misspellings, sitelinks to your key pages, and a bid high enough to hold the top position. Brand clicks are cheap, and the campaign protects you against anyone bidding on competitor brand terms that happen to be yours.

Claim and lock down your Google Business Profile. Impersonators sometimes create duplicate profiles for your business name. Claim yours as the primary owner, verify it, and report duplicates through the profile’s suggest-an-edit tools.

How businesses protect paid ads from scams more broadly

Account security stops more losses than click blocking does. The most expensive scams in paid advertising are not fraudulent clicks but stolen accounts and fake support calls, and both are preventable.

• Two-step verification on every login. Turn it on for the Google Ads account and for every Google account with access to it, including your agency’s.
• Manager account hygiene. Keep the account in your business’s name, link the agency through its manager account, and review the user list quarterly. Remove anyone who has left.
• Payment controls. Use a dedicated card with a limit, set an account-level monthly spend limit, and turn on billing alerts.
• Fake “Google Ads support”. Google does not cold-call advertisers to fix their accounts or ask for payment details over the phone. Treat any unsolicited call or email about your account as a scam and log in directly to check.
• Never share credentials. No vendor, tool or agency needs your password. Every tool in the comparison above connects through an authorised integration you can revoke.

What to look for in an SSP to reduce ad fraud and invalid traffic

If you buy programmatic inventory, choose supply-side platforms and exchanges that filter invalid traffic pre-bid through an MRC-accredited vendor, enforce ads.txt and sellers.json, and hold TAG Certified Against Fraud status. Those three checks remove most of the inventory that fraud lives in before your bid is ever placed.

Then ask about the parts that vary. Transparent supply path reporting should show you every intermediary between your bid and the publisher, so you can cut resellers you do not recognise. Post-bid invalid traffic reporting should reconcile against your own verification vendor’s numbers. And the refund policy for confirmed invalid traffic should be in the contract, with a defined process and timeframe, not a goodwill gesture.

How to reduce fraud without hurting conversion

Block on evidence, not on suspicion. Every exclusion you add also removes some genuine customers, so the goal is to remove the traffic that never converts while leaving the rest alone.

Start with shared IP addresses. Mobile carriers and NBN providers use carrier-grade NAT, which can put thousands of real people behind one public address. Blocking an IP because it clicked three times in a day can block a suburb. Look for volume and behaviour together: many clicks, no engagement, no conversions, repeated over days.

Tune every exclusion against conversion data. Before you exclude a placement, a location or an hour of the day, check what it has converted in the last 90 days, and check lead quality in your CRM, not only the conversion count in Google Ads. If you turn on a third-party tool, run it in monitoring mode first, then compare a holdout period before and after blocking begins on cost per lead and lead quality. A tool that cuts clicks by 15 per cent and leads by 15 per cent has saved you nothing.

Review the blocked list monthly. Every tool produces false positives, and an IP that was a bot in March may be a customer’s office in June.

Is search volume a reliable way to measure fraud activity?

No. Search volume measures demand for a keyword, not invalid clicks on your ad, and the two move for different reasons. A spike in searches for your brand after a radio campaign, a news story or a public holiday sale looks identical, in volume terms, to nothing at all happening on the fraud side.

The downsides of using search volume as a fraud signal are practical. Seasonality moves volume every month. Brand campaigns and PR move it in bursts. Keyword Planner volumes are rounded, averaged over twelve months and reported with a lag, so they cannot show you what happened on Tuesday. And volume has no link to clicks, cost or conversions, which is where fraud does its damage.

Use signals that connect to money instead: invalid click rate by campaign and keyword, conversion rate by source, device and hour of day, the click-to-lead ratio over time, lead quality as recorded in the CRM, and call tracking data that shows whether the calls you paid for were answered and were real.

A five-step routine to detect and prevent click fraud

1. Add the invalid clicks and invalid click rate columns and check them weekly, noting the campaign changes made that week beside any spike.
2. Review search terms and placements every week. Add negatives and placement exclusions for anything with clicks and no engagement.
3. Exclude on evidence. Add IP exclusions only for addresses with repeated, unengaged clicks over several days, and review the list monthly.
4. Schedule and geo-fence. Run non-brand campaigns in the hours someone can answer the phone, keep brand on 24/7, and target the suburbs you serve.
5. Decide on a tool by spend and exposure. If invalid click rate is rising, competitors are aggressive or spend is large enough that a few per cent of waste matters, trial ClickCease, Lunio or CHEQ in monitoring mode and judge it on lead quality.

Working with a managed Google Ads team

In a PWD managed account, invalid click rate, search terms, placements and brand protection are reviewed as part of the service, and every exclusion is made against the conversion and CRM data behind it. We run non-brand campaigns weekdays 6am to 6pm Perth time and brand campaigns 24/7, so fraud gets fewer hours to operate and customers get all of them.

Not sure how much of your budget is going to bots? Talk to PWD about managed Google Ads in Perth and ask us to review your invalid click data, or call 08 6146 0195.