Click fraud, conversion fraud, and invalid traffic, explained for people spending real money on ads.
Three independent figures frame ad fraud in 2026: Juniper Research put the cost near $84 billion (22% of ad spend), Imperva measured bots at 51% of web traffic, and the ANA found only $439 of every $1,000 of programmatic spend reaches a real consumer.
Read moreGoogle filters obvious invalid clicks and credits some back, but it is opaque and conservative on sophisticated bots. A detection tag scores sessions, and ClickLens turns detected bots into IP and placement exclusions synced to Google Ads.
Read moreInvalid traffic splits into two classes. GIVT (declared bots, data-centre traffic, crawlers) is identifiable from a list and gets filtered by signature. SIVT imitates humans and can only be caught on behavioural and consistency checks.
Read moreA conversion pixel fires the instant a form submits or a purchase completes. It has no model of whether the actor was human. Bots made up 51% of web traffic in 2024 (Imperva), and a pixel counts every automated conversion as real.
Read moreAutomated bidding buys more traffic resembling past converters, so a single fake conversion becomes a daily training signal that keeps spending. Bots made up 51% of web traffic in 2024 (Imperva), and each automated conversion teaches the algorithm to find more like it.
Read moreConversion fraud is bots completing the actions you optimise for: form fills, sign-ups, purchases. Bots made up 51% of web traffic in 2024 (Imperva), and a fake conversion trains your bidding to buy more of the same.
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