Exclusions and Platform Sync
Turn detected fraud into ad-platform exclusions
Detection is only half the job. Once ClickLens flags an IP or a placement as a source of invalid traffic, you want it stopped at the ad platform so it cannot cost you again. An exclusion rule does that. ClickLens keeps your rules, syncs the ones each platform can accept, and tells you plainly where a platform's API will not let it go further.
Platform sync is on the Growth plan and above. Creating and viewing rules is available on every plan. Google Ads sync is live today; Microsoft and Meta sync are rolling out, and TikTok is report-only.
Rule types
An exclusion rule is one of three types:
| Type | What it targets |
|---|---|
ip | A single IP address that produced bot or suspect traffic. |
placement | A publisher domain or app where your ads ran against invalid traffic. |
fingerprint | A device fingerprint seen across many fraudulent sessions. Used inside ClickLens for scoring; not pushed to any ad platform. |
Rules come from two places: the daily job auto-creates rules for high-confidence bot IPs, and you can add or remove rules by hand. ClickLens can also recommend exclusions ranked by bot rate before you commit to any of them.
What each platform can exclude
The four ad platforms expose very different controls. An ad API that cannot exclude an IP is a limit ClickLens cannot engineer around, so the matrix below is the honest ceiling, not a roadmap.
| Platform | IP | Placement | Conversion adjustment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | Yes | Yes | Retract or restate by gclid |
| Microsoft Ads | No | Yes — rolling out | Retract or restate by msclkid — rolling out |
| Meta Ads | No | Yes — rolling out | Report-only |
| TikTok Ads | No | Report-only | Report-only |
Conversion adjustment is a separate feature from exclusion sync. Where it says retract or restate, those write-backs run in a measured rollout: ClickLens shows the adjustment it would make on each conversion before it changes anything in your account. Read how that works in conversion protection.
How a sync runs
- Connect the ad account once, through the platform's OAuth flow, in Settings.
- Trigger a sync from the dashboard. ClickLens collects the rules that platform can accept and that have not synced yet.
- It refreshes the access token and pushes the rules through the platform's own exclusion API, then marks each pushed rule as synced so it is never sent twice.
- You get back how many rules synced, how many failed, and any platform errors verbatim. Rules a platform cannot take are reported, never silently dropped.
A daily cron also pushes newly auto-created exclusions to every connected account, so the common case needs no manual step after the first connection.