New Ad Fraud Intelligence Report Highlights Rising Risk for Digital Ad Budgets

The latest Ad Fraud Intelligence Report from mFilterIt signals that invalid traffic is eroding a significant share of digital ad investment, especially in high-growth markets and performance-focused campaigns. From ClickPatrol’s perspective, the message for PPC professionals is clear: without active fraud prevention, a growing portion of Google Ads, Meta Ads and programmatic budgets will continue to be consumed by fake clicks and non-human activity, corrupting both performance and analytics.

What the new ad fraud report reveals

The mFilterIt report examines ad fraud and invalid traffic patterns across formats, channels and regions, with a particular focus on mobile-heavy and app-led advertising. It underlines that fraudsters are not only inflating impressions and clicks, but also simulating deeper engagement signals that many performance marketers now optimize for.

We see the same pattern at ClickPatrol when auditing accounts that have never used click fraud protection before. Advertisers usually underestimate how much non-human or abusive traffic is being counted as valid clicks, especially in campaigns that rely on broad targeting, automated bidding or large affiliate and publisher networks.

Key findings from the Ad Fraud Intelligence Report

While methodologies differ between vendors, the high-level signals from the mFilterIt Ad Fraud Intelligence Report align with what we hear from performance marketers globally. The report highlights, among other points:

• A noticeable share of digital ad spend being exposed to invalid traffic and fraudulent activity, particularly across mobile-focused campaigns.
• App and performance-driven environments facing concentrated fraud pressure, including install fraud and manipulated engagement metrics.
• Fraud schemes evolving from basic bots and repeated clicks to more sophisticated behavioral patterns that mimic real user journeys.
• Brand and performance campaigns both at risk, with fake traffic inflating reach, CTR and engagement metrics that advertisers rely on for optimization.
• Growing concern from advertisers and agencies about the reliability of campaign data when fraud detection is not actively in place.

For PPC teams managing large budgets, these trends directly affect CAC, ROAS and longer-term decisions on which channels, audiences and creatives to scale.

Why this matters for PPC, click fraud and traffic quality

Invalid traffic is not just a brand safety or compliance topic. In pay-per-click environments, every fake or abusive click is literal budget lost and a distortion of your performance baseline. When click fraud is left unchecked, automated bidding systems end up optimizing toward patterns that are partly driven by bots or fraudulent users instead of genuine customers.

This is particularly damaging in channels like Google Ads and Meta Ads, where algorithms quickly adjust bids and placements based on recent performance. If 5 to 20 percent of observed conversions or micro-actions are influenced by fraudulent behavior, your bidding logic, audience expansion and creative testing all move in the wrong direction.

From our work with advertisers, we often see three recurring issues when traffic quality is not monitored:

• Rising cost per lead or cost per acquisition even when conversion tracking appears stable.
• Spikes in clicks from data centers, suspicious devices or abnormal geos that do not convert at expected rates.
• Analytics reports that show healthy engagement but weak downstream metrics such as repeat purchase, LTV or qualified pipeline.

How sophisticated ad fraud evades basic filters

One of the report’s core messages is that ad fraud has become more behaviorally complex. Basic bot farms and obvious repeated clicks still exist, but a growing share of invalid traffic imitates human-like browsing, scrolling and multi-step engagement.

Fraudsters use tactics such as device spoofing, dynamic IP rotation, injected traffic on publisher sites and incentivized users who click and install apps without genuine intent to use or buy. These patterns can pass simple checks and are often hard to distinguish from low-intent but legitimate traffic if you only look at surface-level metrics.

This is why ClickPatrol focuses on analyzing many behavioral and technical signals at the click level instead of relying purely on static blocklists or basic anomaly thresholds. For example, we routinely examine:

• Click timing and frequency across campaigns, ad groups and keywords.
• Unusual combinations of device, OS, browser and user agent.
• Geographic inconsistencies relative to targeting and conversion locations.
• Session depth and on-site behavior after the click.
• Infrastructure fingerprints that indicate data center or proxy usage.

By profiling these signals over time, it is possible to differentiate real prospects from scripted or incentivized activity and to automatically block abusive sources before they consume more budget.

Impact on attribution, optimization and reporting

The report also underlines a less visible cost of ad fraud: distorted data. If your reporting and attribution models treat fake interactions as normal users, every strategic decision becomes less reliable.

Examples we regularly encounter include:

• Overvalued traffic sources where a small group of fraudulent publishers or placements drives a disproportionate share of clicks.
• Retargeting lists polluted with invalid users, which inflates impression volume but rarely contributes to incremental revenue.
• Lookalike or similar audiences being trained on mixed-quality seed data that includes bots or non-buyers.

For PPC managers, this means your “top performing” keywords or audiences may be partially built on bad data. Cleaning up traffic quality often reveals that some of the campaigns considered to be strong performers are actually riding on inflated metrics driven by invalid traffic.

What PPC teams should do in response to the report

Given the trends highlighted in the Ad Fraud Intelligence Report, PPC specialists and agencies should treat traffic quality and click fraud prevention as an ongoing operational task, not a one-time audit.

We recommend that advertisers:

• Review placement, publisher and app reports regularly and exclude suspicious sources that show volume without meaningful conversions.
• Monitor anomalous patterns such as very high click-through rates with low on-site engagement or conversion rates.
• Segment performance by device, geo and time of day to spot pockets of waste that may reflect invalid traffic.
• Align fraud monitoring with key business metrics such as qualified leads, sales and revenue, rather than only click or impression metrics.

Most importantly, use specialized click fraud protection that inspects every click in real time and blocks abusive sources automatically at the platform level.

How ClickPatrol strengthens protection and data quality

At ClickPatrol, we focus specifically on protecting Google Ads, Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads budgets from fake, bot or repeated clicks. Our systems evaluate multiple signals per click to determine whether the interaction originates from a legitimate potential customer or a suspicious source.

When we detect invalid behavior, we automatically block that user or source from seeing and clicking your ads again. This approach delivers three main outcomes for advertisers:

• Budget protection: Fewer wasted clicks on bots, competitors or abusive users.
• Cleaner data: Conversion and engagement metrics that more accurately reflect real users.
• Stronger optimization: Bidding and targeting decisions guided by trustworthy analytics instead of distorted metrics.

For teams reacting to the findings of the new Ad Fraud Intelligence Report and looking to reduce their exposure, starting with a focused traffic quality audit is a practical first step. You can then layer ClickPatrol on top of your existing PPC activity to block fake clicks in real time and measure how much budget is recovered.

Advertisers and agencies that want to understand their own exposure to click fraud can start a free trial of ClickPatrol or speak to our team to review current traffic quality and protection options.

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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