Fake competitor traffic in 2025: Real campaign losses, and case studies

Fake competitor traffic refers to non-human or artificially generated visits, clicks, or engagements sent to a competitor’s website, ads, or analytics on purpose.

Between 15% and 30% of all PPC clicks globally are fraudulent, potentially wasting billions in annual ad budgets.

Equally concerning, an average of 14% of clicks on sponsored search ads are fraudulent, meaning advertisers are unknowingly paying for large volumes of invalid traffic.

In this article, we will discuss the hidden cost of competitor IP traffic and real campaign examples, including ClickPatrol case studies, and show how ClickPatrol protects ad budgets by blocking competitor IPs, stopping malicious clicks, and restoring reliable campaign data.

What is fake competitor traffic in PPC? (Definition & examples)

Fake competitor traffic occurs when your competitors or their agents intentionally click your ad.

This is not an accidental click from a curious user, as it is a strategic click intended to harm your campaigns.

These competitors can inflate your CPC, deplete ad budgets, and skew performance data, thereby slowing lead generation and online visibility.

While click fraud also originates from bots, automated scripts, or unrelated malicious actors, competitor-driven fake clicks are especially damaging due to their focused, persistent nature and often stem from real IPs or devices.

Why fake competitor traffic is dangerous for PPC performance and budget

Most marketers grossly underestimate the financial and strategic impact of fake competitor traffic.

The consequences are often more far-reaching than they’d think:

Increased advertising costs

Every illegitimate click costs you money when your competitors send fake clicks, your cost-per-lead skyrockets.

In campaigns focused on high‑CPC keywords, this can easily result in thousands of dollars in wasted spend every month.

Distorted analytics

Marketing decisions are based on accurate data. Fraudulent clicks distort key metrics:

• CTR
• Conversion rate
• CPA
• ROAS

Reduced ad visibility

Paid ad platforms such as Google Ads work on a budget-and-performance basis for impressions.

If your budget is rapidly depleting through fake clicks, your ads appear less often in front of real customers, giving competitors a chance to dominate the market.

Strategic disadvantage

Beyond immediate financial losses, fake competitor traffic gives your rivals a persistent strategic advantage by forcing you to cap campaigns or spend inefficiently; they may attract more real leads while your marketing lags behind.

Real click fraud case studies: How competitor traffic wastes PPC budgets

Real-world examples make the cost of fake competitor traffic much clearer.

Here are a few case studies from ClickPatrol, illustrating the damage caused by intentional competitor clicks:

Conservio: 14% Non‑Human Traffic & Close to $2,000 Saved

Conservio is a nature-positive travel company whose paid campaigns were once fully optimized.

Yet they realized something odd: ad spend was disproportionately high, while conversions were low.

They suspected unscrupulous actors, competitors, or bots were repeatedly clicking their ads.

After deploying ClickPatrol, Conservio saw immediate improvements: non-human traffic went down 14%, and the company saved about $1,940 in ad spend.

Oliverson & Huss: Legal firm wasting thousands on fake clicks

Another documented example comes from Oliverson & Huss, a criminal defence law firm based in the U.S., which found that their daily Google Ads budget of about $700 regularly exceeded $2,000 without corresponding conversions.

Their analytics showed a flood of clicks, but none of them turned into clients.

With ClickPatrol’s protection enabled, they could quickly identify repeated clicks from suspect IPs and block them.

They estimated that they saved about $6,000 in wasted monthly spending.

Hidden costs of fake competitor traffic beyond ad spend

While the direct financial cost of fake competitor traffic is serious, there are additional costs that are often overlooked:

Time wasted on investigation and mitigation

Marketing teams might spend hours analyzing click logs by hand, flagging suspicious IPs, and adjusting settings, with little clarity on whether they’ve addressed the root problem.

Missed business opportunities

Every click by a fake competitor is a lost opportunity for a real potential customer.

Where fake clicks are the majority, real leads may never see your landing pages and conversions, and lifetime value suffers as a result.

Long-term strategic damage

Prolonged fake clicks can, over time, unnecessarily force marketers to change ad strategies by pausing ads, lowering budgets, and abandoning keywords.

That gives competitors a sustained performance advantage in search results and ad auctions.

Eroded trust in data

When analytics are polluted with fake clicks, you lose confidence in the numbers.

This can lead to bad strategic decisions, such as investing more in underperforming campaigns or cutting back on what would actually be valuable.

How ClickPatrol detects and stops fake competitor traffic in real-time

The good news is that fake competitor traffic can be mitigated and often reversed.

ClickPatrol is built precisely for this. Here’s how:

• IP monitoring & blocking: ClickPatrol finds repetitions or suspicious clicks from the same IP addresses or IP ranges.
• Real-time protection: It continuously monitors clicks, so suspicious activity is acted on right then and there.
• AI-powered detection: By analyzing hundreds of click characteristics, such as device, behaviour, IP, and frequency, among others, ClickPatrol differentiates probable fraud from real traffic, even in those cases where your competitors try to camouflage their activities using VPNs, residential proxies, or rotating IPs.
• Cleaner analytics for smarter decisions: With fake clicks filtered out, your metrics reflect true user behavior.
• Improved campaign efficiency and ROI: As in the Conservio and Giordano case studies, cleaning up fake traffic can dramatically improve engagement and conversion metrics and save real money.

Best practices to reduce fake competitor clicks in PPC campaigns

While ClickPatrol offers powerful protection, combining this with broader best practices helps fortify your campaigns even more:

• Perform regular checks on the click patterns: Observe sudden spikes in clicks without conversions, especially from the same IP ranges or geographies.
• IP exclusions in ad platforms: Manually exclude known suspect IPs wherever possible. ClickPatrol makes this easier by exporting blacklists.
• Set up conversion tracking alerts: Get alerted when the conversions drop with clicks remaining high, a classic signal of fake traffic.
• Segment campaigns based on geography or device: If your competitors are local, narrow targeting and eliminate suspicious regions or IP blocks.
• Rotate ad copy and landing pages periodically: Changing landing page URLs makes it more difficult for competitors or bots to target the same ad multiple times.

Final thoughts: How to protect your PPC budget from competitor fraud

Fake competitor traffic isn’t merely a suspicion; it is an expensive reality that siphons off PPC budgets, corrupts analytics, and robs actual buyers of visibility.

As the above campaign examples show, the damage extends far beyond wasted clicks: it slashes ROI, weakens campaigns, and hands competitors an unfair advantage.

ClickPatrol returns budget to advertisers by detecting suspicious activity and blocking competitor IPs before they can view or click ads, keeping campaigns efficient and analytics clean.

Start protecting your PPC budget from today with ClickPatrol and make every click count again.

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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