How to Avoid Scams and Fraud This Holiday Season on PPC Ad Platforms

Holiday shopping always attracts scammers, and this year the pressure is also on digital advertisers. While consumers watch for fake online stores, performance marketers face a quieter threat: click fraud and invalid traffic that drain budgets during the most expensive weeks of the year. At ClickPatrol, we are seeing a clear spike in suspicious activity across Google Ads, Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads as holiday campaigns ramp up.

Holiday fraud is rising on both consumer and advertiser sides

Consumer protection agencies are warning shoppers about fake offers, phishing links and bogus customer support numbers that appear in search results and social feeds during peak retail periods. At the same time, PPC data shows higher volumes of nonhuman clicks, automated scripts and abusive repeat visitors as ad competition and bids increase.

For advertisers, that combination is risky. You pay more for each click at the exact moment fraudsters are more active. If you do not control invalid traffic, your best performing campaigns can quickly become unprofitable and your reporting becomes unreliable.

Why holiday PPC campaigns attract more click fraud

From our monitoring across accounts, we typically see several repeat patterns when holiday budgets go live:

• Higher bids invite more abuse. Aggressive bidding on high intent keywords makes each click more valuable to scammers that run click farms or automated tools.
• Rush to launch weakens controls. In the scramble to push new creatives and offers, advertisers often relax geo settings, schedule rules and placement filters, which opens more doors to fake clicks.
• Retargeting lists get polluted. Bots and low quality visitors entering your remarketing pools lead to repeated fake impressions and clicks as your frequency caps are tested.
• Competitor interference increases. Competitive verticals sometimes see suspicious patterns from rival IPs or locations that repeatedly hit search or shopping ads.

These patterns are visible in Google Ads, Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts when you look closely at IP ranges, device fingerprints, user agents and abnormal engagement behavior.

How to avoid scams and fraud this holiday season in your PPC data

Protecting consumers and protecting your PPC budget share the same principle: verify before you trust. For media buyers and agencies, that means treating every spike in clicks as a signal to inspect traffic quality, not as automatic success.

Practical checks inside your ad platforms

We recommend that advertisers and agencies take the following steps during the next 60 days of holiday activity:

• Monitor sudden CTR jumps. If click through rate increases without a matching rise in conversions or engaged sessions, review search terms, placements and locations for suspicious patterns.
• Drill into geographic reports. Look for clusters of clicks from regions that your business does not serve or that were not in your targeting plan. Repeated activity from the same area with no purchases is a red flag.
• Compare device and browser data. Oversized traffic from a single device type or obscure browser, combined with short sessions and high bounce rates, often points to automated activity.
• Review remarketing lists. Exclude low quality segments that trigger ad views and clicks but never progress down the funnel.

These checks help identify problems, but they do not actively stop fake clicks from hitting your budget in real time. That is where specialized protection becomes critical in peak season.

How ClickPatrol blocks fake clicks before they drain holiday budgets

ClickPatrol connects to your Google Ads, Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts and evaluates every click across many behavioral and technical signals. Our systems review patterns such as repeated visits from the same IP or device, abnormal click timing, suspicious user agents and other signals that are difficult to see from standard platform reports.

When we classify traffic as likely fake, we automatically block that source from seeing and clicking your ads again. The result is that your campaigns spend more on real users who can actually convert, your remarketing lists stay cleaner and your analytics reflect what is really working.

Cleaner data for better holiday decisions

For performance marketers, the biggest cost of click fraud is not just wasted spend but distorted data. If a third of your clicks are from bots or abusive users, your cost per acquisition, return on ad spend and attribution models are all skewed.

By removing invalid clicks, ClickPatrol helps you:

• Identify true winning keywords and audiences. Decisions are based on human behavior, not fake traffic spikes.
• Scale confident campaigns. When you increase budgets on proven ad groups, you know you are backing real demand.
• Report accurately to stakeholders. Agencies can show clients that they are actively protecting budgets and improving traffic quality during the most expensive months of the year.

Key takeaways for PPC teams this holiday season

Scams and fraud are no longer just a consumer story. For PPC professionals, they are a line item on the media plan. Holiday traffic delivers huge opportunity, but it also exposes gaps in click fraud protection and traffic quality controls.

Our advice from the ClickPatrol side is direct:

• Treat abnormal click growth with skepticism until you confirm conversion quality.
• Use platform reports to surface suspicious locations, devices and patterns, then tighten your targeting.
• Deploy real time click protection so fake users are blocked before they can keep clicking your ads.

If you want to see how much of your current Google Ads, Meta Ads or Microsoft Ads traffic may be invalid, you can review it with ClickPatrol on a trial basis. Many advertisers choose to run us alongside their existing analytics for a short period to understand the impact. The findings often reshape how they plan and protect holiday budgets for the rest of the season.

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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