How Spam Clicks Destroy Ad Campaigns
Are fake clicks hurting your ad performance? Find out how spam clicks operate, their impact on campaigns, and tools to safeguard your budget.
New report:
Invalid Click Rate Benchmarks
Invalid Click Rate: Averages and Benchmarks for Google Ads
- July 11, 2025
Invalid clicks have a massive impact on the performance of your ad campaigns, and like most marketers, you’re probably wondering how your invalid click rates stack up against other Google ad campaigns out there.
Since we deal with invalid traffic daily, we decided to sift through the data and answer the question, “What’s the average invalid click rate?” once and for all in this report.
Read on to see where your ad category stands and what you can do to drive down those invalid clicks.
Data set analyzed & methodology
Our report is based on A LOT of data.
The data provided in this article is based on an analysis of 96 million ad clicks across 85,000 accounts and 24,582 active campaigns on Google Ads over a 6 month period, ending June 30, 2025. The data is provided from a section of Fraud Blocker’s data, based on their clients’ connections to the Fraud Blocker platform. All data in this report is anonymous.
What are invalid clicks?
Invalid clicks are clicks that do not have legitimate intent or are not from real users. These clicks will likely never convert, because they aren’t backed by the intention to convert or learn more about the product.
Invalid clicks include:
- Botnets: These are networks of compromised computers or devices controlled by cybercriminals to generate large volumes of fake traffic. This type of invalid traffic is often used for activities such as click fraud, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, and other malicious operations. This artificially inflates website metrics, causing financial losses for advertisers. For further details, check out more on Click Bots.
- Click Farms: These involve organized groups of individuals or automated systems that manually click on ads or engage with websites to artificially boost engagement metrics. Often employed to commit ad fraud, click farms can also manipulate social media metrics, misleading advertisers and brands about the reach and effectiveness of their campaigns. Learn more about Click Farms here.
- Ad Injection, Adware, and Malware: This refers to malicious software that inserts unauthorized advertisements into web pages or redirects users to different sites. These tactics not only divert legitimate ad revenue but also damage the user experience and erode trust by compromising website integrity.
- Pixel Stuffing and Ad Stacking: These deceptive techniques involve displaying ads in a way that hides them from users. For example, pixel stuffing compresses multiple ads into a single, invisible pixel, while ad stacking layers multiple ads on top of each other in the same ad space. Although these ads are not visible to users, they still register as impressions, tricking advertisers into paying for views that never actually occurred. For more on these tactics, see Pixel Stuffing and Ad Stacking.
Read more:
What is the average invalid click rate (for Google Ads)?
The average invalid click rate for Google Ads is 11.5%. This is an average across all industries and campaign types.
Your invalid click rates might be higher or lower depending on several factors:
One key factor is the industry, as high competitive ones such as legal services and real estate will see higher invalid click rates.
Some other factors that could raise or lower your invalid click rates are geo-targeting, ad content and keywords, Negative keywords, and so on.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, as any targeting factor can affect your invalid click rates.
On some days there are spikes in invalid traffic. For example, on September 7, 2024, Google Ads had 40% of all clicks on Google determined to be invalid (229,000 invalid clicks). This is likely an attack on Google ad traffic that day by sophisticated bots. Google ultimately refunded customers.
Average invalid click rate by year (for Google Ads)
Our data shows that invalid click rates have doubled from 5.9% in 2010 to 12.3% in 2024. This is likely due to the increased sophistication of AI-driven bots, click bots, malware and more.
Here is the same invalid click rate data as a table:
| Year | Avg Invalid Click Rate |
| 2010 | 5.9% |
| 2015 | 8.0% |
| 2020 | 11.1% |
| 2021 | 11.6% |
| 2022 | 10.8% |
| 2023 | 11.8% |
| 2024 | 12.3% |
| 2025 | 11.5%* |
* Data as of June 30, 2025
Average invalid click rate by campaign type (for Google Ads)
Search ads have the highest invalid click rate at 14.8%, followed by display ads at z%. Xzy seems to have the fewest invalid clicks of any Google Ads campaign.
From our findings, the more common a Google campaign type is, the higher the invalid click rate.
Google Ads does not provide information on Demand Gen and video ads so those have not been included here.
- Search – 14.8%
- Display – TBD
- Performance Max – 6.2% *Google only provides “invalid interaction rate”
- Shopping – TBD
- Local – TBD
- Hotel – TBD
- Not provided by Google:
- Demand Gen
- Video/YouTube
Comparison of average invalid click rates from other sources
Google’s invalid click numbers are a great benchmark, but we wanted to go a step further and compare them against an independent study and our own data.
Here are the results:
Fraud Blocker
We reviewed internal data for over 95M ad clicks, and found that the average invalid click rate for data on our platform was 17.87%. This data represents an average across organizations of all industries and company sizes.
Juniper Research
An independent study done by Juniper Research showed that 22% of all ad spend was lost to ad fraud, and estimated global losses in 2023 were a whopping $84.2 billion. This figure covers a blend of advertising channels, including display, social, mobile and more.
By 2028, this loss is projected to nearly double, reaching $172.3 billion.
Looking at click fraud specifically, Juniper Research estimates that 17% of click-throughs on PCs and desktops in 2023 were fraudulent. That resulted in about $37 billion being wasted. The number is estimated to grow to over 65 billion by 2028.
You can read the full Juniper Research report here.
How to find your invalid click rate in Google Ads
To see the number of invalid clicks identified by Google Ads, follow these steps in your main reports dashboard:
- Click on “Campaigns” in the main left navigation menu.
- Select “Campaigns” again in the secondary navigation.
- At the top of the report data, click “Columns.“
- Add “Invalid Clicks” and “Invalid Click Rate“, along with any other relevant data points.
- Click “Save.“
You can now scroll to the right to view the new columns and access the data on invalid clicks.
How to get a refund for invalid clicks on Google Ads
Invalid clicks on Google Ads are refunded automatically. You’ll see these as credits in your billing transactions.
If you feel you’ve had invalid clicks beyond what Google is showing, such as after you received an usually high volume of fake leads, you can complete Google’s Click Quality Form (warning: success rates can be low).
There are a few things to keep in mind before submitting, so be sure to check out our article for a full breakdown: How to Get a Refund for Invalid Clicks from Google Ads.
5 ways to lower your invalid click rate
Google’s refund process can be difficult and the success rate is low.
Instead, there are more proactive measures you can take to avoid wasting your money in the first place.
Here are 5 effective ways to be proactive, protect your budget, and lower your invalid click rate:
- Use click fraud detection software: Invest in specialized click fraud detection tools that monitor your ads in real time, identifying suspicious click patterns, bot activity, and fraudulent sources. They automatically block suspicious IPs, protecting your campaigns from invalid clicks before they impact your budget.
- Implement IP exclusions: Identify IP addresses associated with suspicious or repeated clicks and add them to your IP exclusion list in Google Ads. This blocks your ads from appearing to these IPs, reducing the risk of invalid clicks from known sources.
- Use geotargeting: If you notice higher invalid click rates in certain regions, narrow your targeting to areas where legitimate engagement is more likely. You can exclude high-risk regions where fraudulent clicks are more common, optimizing your ad spend on higher-quality traffic.
- Avoid made-for-advertising websites: Made-for-advertising (MFA) websites are designed solely to generate ad revenue, often featuring excessive ads, low-quality content, and layouts that encourage accidental clicks. Add known MFA sites to your exclusion list in Google Ads to prevent your ads from appearing on these and lower the risk of invalid clicks.
- Use negative keyword lists: Adding a negative keyword list to your Google Ads campaign filters out irrelevant traffic and improves your ad performance. An example is excluding terms like “cheap” or “free” on ads for premium products. This keeps your ads focused on ready-to-buy users, reducing wasteful and invalid clicks.
Prevent invalid clicks with Fraud Blocker
Fraud Blocker offers an all-in-one solution that optimizes ad performance by identifying, analyzing, and preventing ads from being served to bots, competitors, and other sources of non-human traffic.
To do this, our tool tracks web visitors’ IP addresses and device fingerprints and reviews dozens of real-time signals like bounce rates, IP-to-device rations, VPNs, click frequency, and more to differentiate legitimate users from invalid traffic.
Once a low-quality user is detected, Fraud Blocker immediately prevents your ads from reaching them, preserving your budget and enhancing ad performance.
Ready to see the impact? Try Fraud Blocker’s 7-day free trial and discover just how much you can save while protecting your ad investment.
Invalid Click Calculator
*Results shown are estimations only
Amount Wasted on Invalid Clicks
([benchmark]-[campaign-type])*[ad-spend]
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