New Ad Fraud Intelligence Report Puts Full-Funnel Trust in the Spotlight for PPC Advertisers

A new ad fraud intelligence report is pushing the idea of “full-funnel trust” to the forefront, arguing that advertisers can no longer afford to focus on fraud only at the click or install stage. From our perspective at ClickPatrol, this shift is long overdue: performance marketers need protection and validation from impression and click quality through to conversions, retention and revenue, or their PPC numbers risk being quietly distorted by invalid traffic.

Full-funnel trust: why it matters for PPC and ad fraud

The core message of the new report is clear. Fraud, manipulation and low-quality traffic are no longer confined to top-of-funnel activity. Tactics now appear at every stage of the user journey, including:

• Fake impressions and viewability inflation that distort awareness metrics.
• Non-human or incentivized clicks on Google Ads, Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads that waste budgets and pollute data.
• Install and lead fraud that inflates acquisition volumes while delivering little or no downstream value.
• Post-install and post-signup fraud where bots or farms simulate in-app events or repeated form fills to hit optimization goals.

For PPC teams, this means that even campaigns with seemingly strong performance can be quietly misdirected. Smart bidding strategies that optimize toward conversions or in-app events can be trained on fake or low-intent behaviors, pushing more spend into the wrong audiences and placements.

Headline findings on ad fraud and traffic quality

The intelligence report synthesizes data from multiple markets and ad environments to highlight how widespread quality issues have become. Key themes include a rising share of invalid activity on performance campaigns and the particular vulnerability of mobile and programmatic inventory.

Key findings from the report

• Fraud and invalid traffic were detected across the full marketing funnel, not just at click or install stage, indicating a systemic trust gap in measurement.
• Mobile environments, including in-app inventory, showed some of the highest exposure to sophisticated fraud schemes.
• Programmatic display and open exchanges remained a significant source of suspicious activity compared to more controlled, direct media buys.
• Campaigns optimized on in-app or post-click events were especially vulnerable when those events could be easily simulated by bots or farms.
• Marketers who implemented real-time fraud controls and independent verification saw measurable improvements in traffic quality and downstream performance.

While the exact impact varies by channel and vertical, the message for performance marketers is consistent: if you do not actively validate quality across the funnel, your data, bidding and reporting are at risk.

Why full-funnel trust changes how you manage PPC

Traditionally, many advertisers have tackled fraud reactively: running occasional audits, relying on platform-level filters, or focusing only on obvious click anomalies. The report reinforces what we see daily at ClickPatrol: that approach is no longer enough.

For PPC specialists, full-funnel trust means three concrete shifts in practice:

• From surface metrics to behavior: Looking beyond click-through rate and cost per click to examine dwell time, scroll depth, page interactions and repeated patterns that signal non-human activity.
• From one-time checks to continuous monitoring: Fraud tactics evolve quickly. You need ongoing validation of traffic quality and conversions, not one-off investigations after performance drops.
• From channel-level views to user-level signals: Evaluating behavior per user or device across multiple clicks and sessions, rather than treating each click in isolation.

Without this, it is easy to over-invest in placements that appear cheap but are heavily polluted by bots and click farms, while under-investing in genuinely effective inventory that looks more expensive on the surface.

Implications for ad budgets, bidding and attribution

If invalid traffic is present throughout your funnel, the financial impact goes far beyond wasted clicks. It can quietly distort almost every key decision you make.

• Budget allocation: Fraud-heavy sources look artificially efficient, pulling budget away from higher-quality channels.
• Automated bidding: When fake conversions are fed back into smart bidding algorithms, they reinforce the very placements and audiences that are undermining performance.
• Attribution models: Fraudulent or low-quality touchpoints can capture credit in multi-touch models, masking the real drivers of revenue.
• Forecasting and reporting: Inflated metrics can make forecasts overly optimistic and hide the true cost of acquisition.

From our work with advertisers, we regularly see accounts where 10 to 20 percent of spend is exposed to some form of suspicious or low-value activity, even when headline KPIs look acceptable. The new report adds further evidence that this is not a niche problem but a structural one.

How ClickPatrol approaches full-funnel trust

The report calls for a more holistic approach to verification. At ClickPatrol, we agree that protecting only the first touch is not enough. Our technology evaluates each click using multiple behavioral signals, such as interaction patterns, session frequency, device fingerprints and geographic consistency, to identify invalid and risky activity in real time.

For PPC teams running Google Ads, Meta Ads or Microsoft Ads, this translates into:

• Automatic blocking of fake and repeated clicks: Suspicious users and placements are excluded so future ads are not shown to them.
• Cleaner performance data: By filtering out invalid activity, metrics like click-through rate, conversion rate and cost per acquisition become more reliable.
• More accurate optimization: When your bidding strategies and tests are driven by real user behavior, you can scale winning campaigns with greater confidence.

Full-funnel trust also means validating what happens after the click. That is why we look at downstream patterns such as rapid-fire form submissions, identical lead details, or very short session durations that end immediately after a conversion event is triggered.

What advertisers should do next

For PPC specialists and agencies, the report is a reminder to treat traffic quality as a core performance discipline, not a side project. Practical steps include:

• Auditing your accounts for placements, apps or sites with high clicks but weak engagement or unusual conversion patterns.
• Reviewing conversion events used for optimization to ensure they reflect real value, not easily faked interactions.
• Segmenting performance by traffic source, device and geo to spot anomalies in behavior or conversion quality.
• Introducing independent click and traffic validation, rather than relying solely on platform filters.

If you want to see how much of your current spend is exposed to invalid activity, you can start a free trial of ClickPatrol or speak to our team about a traffic quality review. The direction of travel is clear: as more fraud surfaces across the funnel, the advertisers who win will be those who treat trust, verification and data quality as non-negotiable parts of their PPC strategy.

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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