Digital Ad Fraud Now Mimics Human Behaviour, Raising New Risks For PPC Budgets

Digital ad fraud is closing the gap with real users, according to new research that shows how fake activity is now designed to look convincingly human. For PPC advertisers across Google Ads, Meta and Microsoft Ads, this means a growing share of budgets can be drained by bots, scripts and fake users that pass as genuine prospects and distort campaign data.

At ClickPatrol, we see this shift directly in the traffic patterns our systems analyse. Fraud is no longer just obvious click farms on suspicious IPs. It now includes malware infected devices, hijacked browsers and automated journeys that mimic natural scrolling, realistic time on site and even add to cart actions.

Key findings on human like digital ad fraud

The report behind this latest warning highlights several worrying signals for digital advertising and PPC performance teams:

• Fraudulent activity is increasingly routed through real consumer devices and residential connections, which makes it harder to spot using simple IP or user agent filters.
• Invalid traffic is not limited to clicks. It also shows up as fake impressions, viewable impressions and simulated conversions that can corrupt attribution models.
• Programmatic and open web inventory carry particularly high exposure, but search and social campaigns are also affected when fraudsters target performance budgets.
• Many fraud schemes are designed to exploit automated optimisation, so bidding systems keep sending more budget into placements that only look high performing on the surface.

For performance marketers, the message is clear: relying only on basic platform filters or surface level metrics is no longer enough to protect media spend.

How human like ad fraud hides inside PPC metrics

From our work with advertisers, we see several patterns that match the concerns raised in the report:

• Suspiciously strong engagement from weak audiences where new or low intent cohorts suddenly show high click through rates and frequent site visits, but revenue does not move.
• Inflated conversion signals such as form starts, button clicks or app opens that surge in reporting tools while qualified leads and paying users stay flat.
• Traffic spikes at odd hours that appear to be global users browsing normally, but originate from a limited set of device types or browser versions.
• Retargeting lists full of non buyers generated from fake browsers and hijacked sessions that only exist to collect more impressions and clicks.

Because this behaviour imitates real user journeys, standard fraud checks like very short sessions, very fast repeat clicks or data center IPs catch only a fraction of the problem. Fraudsters optimise their patterns to match normal on site timings and device distributions, which is exactly what the new research warns about.

Why this matters for ad budgets and optimisation

Human like fraud has two direct consequences for PPC budgets. First, you pay for fake impressions and clicks, which is the obvious loss. Second, and often more damaging, your optimisation logic is trained on corrupted data.

If a fake cohort appears to convert well, your automated bidding, audience expansion and creative testing can all shift toward pockets of inventory filled with invalid traffic. Over weeks or months this can drag down return on ad spend without any single red flag being obvious in the daily reports.

For example, we have seen accounts where a few placements with inflated conversion rates pulled a large share of spend into mobile app inventory that later turned out to be dominated by fraudulent activity. The advertiser was not only paying for fake users but also under funding the search campaigns that were generating real revenue.

Detection now requires behavioural analysis per click

The report underlines that simple lists of bad IPs or domains are no longer sufficient against modern digital ad fraud. At ClickPatrol we approach the problem by analysing many behavioural and technical data points for every click and visit, including:

• Click frequency, intervals and patterns over time on each source
• Device and browser fingerprints and how they change across sessions
• Network quality, routing and signals that suggest spoofing or masking
• Real user actions on site such as scroll depth, focus changes and realistic navigation paths
• Correlations between traffic sources, placements and downstream conversions

By combining these signals, we can distinguish real prospective customers from automated or manipulated traffic that only appears human. When our systems are confident that a source is fraudulent, we automatically block it from receiving more budget in platforms like Google Ads, Meta and Microsoft Ads.

Implications for PPC teams and agencies

For PPC specialists and agencies, the findings from this latest report should trigger a review of how you measure performance and control invalid traffic. Relying solely on platform level invalid click credits or broad brand safety filters leaves a gap that fraudsters exploit.

We recommend that advertisers:

• Audit recent campaigns for signs of inflated engagement with weak commercial outcomes
• Compare platform reported conversions with back end sales or lead quality metrics
• Segment performance by placement, app, site and publisher and investigate outliers
• Set clear thresholds for acceptable invalid traffic and regularly track against them
• Use independent detection tools like ClickPatrol to monitor and block suspicious sources in real time

With cleaner traffic and more trustworthy data, you can safely allocate more budget to what genuinely works rather than to whichever placements are best at imitating real users.

India and global markets both see elevated fraud risk

The report also highlights that emerging digital markets, including India, are attractive targets for organised fraud operations. Rapid growth in programmatic buying, heavy use of mobile apps and fragmented publisher ecosystems create more room for fake inventory and spoofed domains.

For global brands and agencies running multi country campaigns, this means fraud controls cannot be one size fits all. Thresholds and monitoring rules need to reflect regional risk, local device habits and the specific exchanges and networks in use.

We regularly see that when advertisers deploy ClickPatrol across multiple markets, the share of invalid traffic can vary widely by country and channel. Without independent verification, these differences remain buried inside blended performance metrics.

What PPC advertisers should do now

The central takeaway from the report is that digital ad fraud no longer looks obviously fake. It acts like a user, behaves like a user and can even appear as a high value converter in your dashboards. That shift requires a different level of scrutiny from performance marketers.

PPC teams that treat invalid traffic as a marginal issue risk training their bidding and budgeting strategies on polluted data. Those who actively monitor and block human like fraud, on the other hand, can recover wasted spend, improve lead and sale quality and gain more confidence in their optimisation decisions.

If you want to understand how much of your current budget may be exposed to sophisticated fraud, you can start a free trial of ClickPatrol or speak with our team to review your recent traffic. Our goal is straightforward: protect your ad spend so you only pay for real users and build your campaigns on reliable data.

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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