Competitor ad clicks in 2025: A 4-pillar strategy to detect, block, validate, and harden PPC campaigns

Competitor ad clicks, commonly referred to as competitor click fraud, are among the most harmful forms of sabotage: the actions of a rival brand or other malicious actors who repeatedly click your paid-for ads to drive up your costs and force you to exhaust your budget without gaining real customers.

Juniper Research estimated 22% of all online ad spend was lost to ad fraud in 2023, equating to approximately $84 billion.

This article explores how to build a sustainable enterprise-ready strategy to defend against competitor ad clicks, from detection to prevention, process changes, and where a tool like

What are competitor ad clicks, and how they impact your PPC campaigns

Competitor ad clicks are intentional clicks on your paid search or display ads from a competitor, or on their behalf, for:

• Drain your daily/weekly ad budget so your ad stops showing.
• Skew campaign metrics to make you pause or change bids incorrectly.
• Raise your CPCs if your account is charged per click.
• Gather intelligence on ad copy or destination pages.

Top 4 pillars: 4-Pillar framework to defend against competitor ad clicks

A one-time fix will not protect your campaigns from competitor ad clicks. For a long-term, sustainable defense, you need a multilayered framework built on 4 essential pillars: detect, block, validate, and harden.

Detect competitor ad clicks: Baselines and anomaly detection

Before you block anything, you must first understand what “normal” looks like for your campaigns.

Industry research has shown that invalid traffic is easier to detect when advertisers combine ad-platform data with deeper telemetry such as server logs, IP metadata, and device fingerprints.

Once your baseline is set, monitor for classic red flags:

• Clicks surge without corresponding conversions.
• Multiple clicks from the same IP address, ISP, or very narrow geographic zone.
• Rapid-fire repeat clicks coming from the same user-agent strings or device fingerprints.
• Odd-hour spikes: late night, early morning, holidays.
• Short on-site sessions or extremely low engagement after the click.
• Actionable tip: Set up a weekly “fraud review” dashboard to compare daily click behavior against a 30–90-day baseline.
• Automatically flag deviations to investigate.

Block competitor ad clicks with IP and device controls

Once the malicious patterns are identified, it is time to ensure that actors cannot see or click your ads.

ClickPatrol is explicitly designed for this stage. It blocks competitor IPs and abusive sources so they cannot load your pages or click your ads again, thus stopping targeted attacks at the root. Such highly effective blocking actions include:

• IP-level blocking: Block abusive IPs, datacentre ranges, and known VPN/proxy endpoints. Prevent these from loading your landing pages and, often, even from seeing your ads.
• User-agent or device fingerprint blocking: Most attackers reuse the same automation frameworks. These signatures can be blocked before they register as valid traffic.
• Rate-limiting rules: throttle excessive clicks from the same IP or device.
• Anti-fraud platforms: Advanced solutions correlate global IP activity, bot signatures, and behavioral patterns to provide dynamic automated protection.
• Actionable tip: The moment an IP generates several clicks with zero engagement, add it to your blocklist straight away and monitor for recurrence.

Validate clicks and recover ad spend from competitor clicks

Blocking alone is not enough. You need to validate traffic, collect evidence, and recover spend where needed.

Key validation practices include:

• Server-side conversion tracking: Confirms whether a click produced a real user action, reducing spoofed or automated conversions.
• Comprehensive logging: Store timestamps, IP addresses, user agents, referring URLs, and ad IDs. These logs are essential when disputing invalid clicks with ad platforms.
• Submit invalid-click claims: Advertisers can request refunds for fake clicks in Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and other DSPs, but the success of these requests depends on clear, more detailed evidence.

Harden PPC campaigns against future competitor clicks

Well-designed campaigns take less damage during attacks and also make the anomalies easier to find.

Finally, make structural changes to reduce your exposure to future attacks:

• Bid caps and pacing rules prevent rapid budget burn during an attack.
• Segmented campaigns with smaller test budgets before scaling.
• Proactive negative audiences and IP exclusions.
• Channel diversification across search, social, retargeting, and owned media.

Competitor ad click detection checklist: Key signals to monitor

When you review campaigns, make these checks in order of priority:

• CTR vs. conversion disconnect: Significant increases in clicks without a corresponding increase in conversions.
• Session depth and dwell time: Clicks that end almost immediately.
• IP clustering: Many clicks from the same /24 or from data centre IP ranges.
• Time-of-day spikes: repeated activity, each time within a narrow hour window.
• User-agent homogeneity: Many clicks with identical or bot-like user-agent strings.
• Referrer anomalies: Clicks coming from known click-farm/referral networks.
• Repeat patterns across campaigns: the same patterns appearing in many ad groups or campaigns.

Using ClickPatrol to protect against competitor ad clicks

ClickPatrol was designed to mitigate targeted repeat-click attacks by using IP blocking and traffic-quality controls.

Here’s how it aligns with the four-pillar framework:

• Detect: ClickPatrol collects per-click signals and provides anomaly detection tuned for PPC campaigns.
• Block: It can block abusive IPs and IP ranges, so those actors can’t see or click your ads again.
• Validate: ClickPatrol keeps logs and matches click events to conversions to generate evidence for platform claims.
• Harden: It introduces rules, rate limits, and geo-exclusions to make campaigns resilient over time.

Layered strategy to safeguard your ad budget from competitor ad clicks

Competitor ad clicks are a targeted, solvable threat; however, they require a sustainable, layered strategy.

Build your defense around detection, blocking, validation, and hardening. Leverage automation where possible; maintain rigorous logs for platform claims and review campaign architecture for exposure reduction.

Platforms like ClickPatrol plug directly into this workflow: they detect malicious patterns, block competitor IPs, and provide the evidence you need to validate claims and harden campaigns over time.

Start your free ClickPatrol trial today to detect, block, and validate competitor ad clicks, protect your ad spend, and maximize ROI.

Abisola

Meet Abisola! As the content manager at ClickPatrol, she’s the go-to expert on all things fake traffic. From bot clicks to ad fraud, Abisola knows how to spot, stop, and educate others about the sneaky tactics that inflate numbers but don’t bring real results.

View all posts by Abisola (Abisola)

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