You wouldn’t hand your wallet to a stranger—and yet, many businesses are unknowingly doing just that every time they run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign without fraud protection.
Fake clicks and phony leads don’t just waste money—they skew your analytics, drain your team’s time, and make it harder to grow.
In this post, we’ll break down the most common types of PPC ad fraud, with examples and red flags to help you spot them in your own campaigns.
1. Bot Traffic
Automated scripts (or bots) are programmed to click your ads or fill out lead forms. These bots can mimic human behavior well enough to fool basic filters—and they’re responsible for a huge portion of ad fraud.
Watch for: spikes in traffic with no conversions, odd user agents, or identical behavior patterns from different users.
2. Click Farms
Click farms use low-paid workers or networks of phones to repeatedly click ads. While not automated, they generate the same outcome: wasted budget.
Watch for: lots of clicks from one region, low engagement after the click, or traffic from mobile-heavy IP ranges.
3. Competitor Sabotage
In high-competition industries, some businesses click each other’s ads to run up costs or exhaust daily budgets. This can cripple a local service provider’s lead generation.
Watch for: repeat clicks from the same IPs, leads with no intent to purchase, or traffic from locations you don’t serve.
4. Form Spam / Lead Injection
Bots or scripts fill out your lead forms using fake or stolen info. These junk leads enter your CRM, waste your sales team’s time, and make reporting a mess.
Watch for: submissions with gibberish names, disposable emails, invalid phone numbers, or repeated entries.
5. Lead Spoofing
Some fraudsters go further and inject fake leads directly into your lead database through unsecured forms or APIs. These leads may appear real but have no human source.
Watch for: identical form submissions, unusual timing patterns, or leads that bypass form pages entirely.
6. Attribution Fraud
Here, the fraudster manipulates the system to take credit for a conversion they didn’t generate—usually to earn affiliate or platform payouts. You may see a boost in reported conversions, but they’re misattributed.
Watch for: odd referral sources, suspicious affiliate traffic, or conversions from traffic with no engagement.
7. Impression Inflation / Publisher Fraud
Some low-quality websites inflate impressions or clicks by auto-refreshing ads or using bots. If you’re running display ads, your budget could be going to fake placements.
Watch for: high click-through rates on unknown sites, low time-on-site, or placements you don’t recognize.
Understanding these types of fraud is the first step toward protecting your PPC budget. In our next post, we’ll dive into real examples of how businesses have been affected—and how they fought back.
Read next: Real Stories of Click Fraud: How Small Businesses Lost Thousands
Or go back to the first post: What Is PPC Lead Fraud?
iQuarius Media helps businesses uncover where their ad dollars are going—and how to stop wasting them. Let’s talk.
