“I’m seeing a surge in clicks on my paid campaigns, but something feels off. The costs are rising, conversions aren’t improving, and a large chunk of my budget is disappearing without any meaningful results. At this point, I’m not even sure if these clicks are from real users—or if competitors, bots, or automated scripts are inflating my numbers and distorting my performance.”
This is a real frustration for marketers investing budgets on ad campaigns to get results. Instead, they challenge like unexpected spikes in clicks, unexplained CPC increases, declining lead quality, and campaign optimizations that simply don’t make sense.
Yet many still assume that only 1–2% of their traffic is invalid.
The data tells a different story. Our analysis of 342 campaigns run in 2024 shows search ads carry close to 10% invalid traffic, while partner networks reach 21%—proving that click fraud inside walled gardens is far more widespread and sophisticated than most expect.
On walled gardens, invalid clicks slip through easily. They distort your algorithms, inflate your CPC, clutter remarketing pools, degrade lead quality, and gradually weaken your entire performance funnel.
In this blog, we break down the real impact of click fraud inside walled gardens—and what you can do to protect your budget, your funnel, and your performance from being quietly derailed by fake traffic.
The Real Impact of Fake Clicks on Search Campaigns
Walled gardens can filter basic invalid traffic, but sophisticated click fraud still slips through. Modern bots behave like real users—clicking, scrolling, even filling forms—making their activity indistinguishable from genuine engagement.
And this is where the real damage begins. Platforms treat every click as intent. So when fake interactions enter your campaigns, they don’t just waste budget—they mislead algorithms, distort signals, and trigger a chain reaction of poor optimizations.
This domino effect impacts every stage of your search campaigns. The points below break down exactly how invalid traffic quietly reshapes performance, from rising CPC to weakened remarketing and declining lead quality.
Sudden Click Spikes Mislead the Algorithm
A sudden rise in clicks may seem like good news, but when those clicks are invalid, they send false demand signals. The algorithm assumes your ad is gaining traction, your audience is responding well, and your targeting is strong. In reality, fake activity steers your campaign in a direction that doesn’t reflect true user intent. Seeing such good numbers, you invest more in your campaign which is already giving you fake ad traffic.
Your CPC Starts Increasing Without Any Logical Reason
Once platforms believe your ads are performing well, they push your ads into more competitive auctions. That’s when CPC starts rising. Nothing changes in your targeting, communication, or creatives; it’s simply the result of invalid clicks convincing the system that your ad deserves more aggressive delivery, even though the engagement wasn’t real.
On-Site Behaviour Drops, Impacting Relevancy Scores
Invalid clicks land on your website and leave immediately. This results in unnaturally high bounce rates and very short, low-quality sessions. Platforms interpret this behaviour as a relevance issue, due to which your ads lose efficiency; delivery weakens, costs rise further, and even good audiences become harder to reach.
Lead Quality Declines and Sales Teams Feel the Impact
The impact of click fraud is not limited only to click stage. The impact begins to show on the entire campaign funnel. Invalid clicks turn into invalid leads through auto-filled forms, fake details, or low-intent submissions. This clutters your CRM and slows down your sales team. Instead of speaking to real prospects, they spend valuable time following up with leads that never had genuine interest or do not even exist. Over time, this pulls down your overall lead-to-opportunity conversion rate.
Know more about how to improve landing page traffic and lead quality
Remarketing Performance Drops Due to Click Fraud
Invalid users also get added to your remarketing lists. When that happens, you end up retargeting audiences with no intent to convert. Remarketing becomes more expensive and less effective. Even worse, algorithms start learning from these polluted audiences, expanding your reach in the wrong direction and pushing you further away from genuine high-intent users.
Analytics Become Unreliable, Leading to Misleading Optimizations
Once invalid clicks affect both initial traffic and remarketing, your analytics start losing accuracy. Conversion paths look unusual, A/B test results become inconsistent, and attribution feels off. Decisions based on this corrupted data lead to incorrect budget shifts, misguided optimizations, and scaling efforts built on signals that don’t reflect real customer behaviour.
Budgets Get Misallocated, Leading to Long-Term Revenue Loss
Algorithms keep pushing budget into ad sets, keywords, or audience segments that seem to bring high engagement, but conversions remain poor. Meanwhile, genuinely strong segments may get reduced investment. The longer this goes unnoticed, the more your budget drifts away from real performance drivers. This leads to long-term revenue loss and lower ROAS.
How mFilterIt Helps Advertisers Eliminate Click Fraud and Take Back Control of Their Funnel
The problem of click fraud inside walled gardens and search ecosystems cannot be solved with platform filters or surface-level analytics alone. Advertisers need a system that protects their funnel from the very first interaction with real-time visibility, smarter detection, and complete transparency. This is exactly where our ad fraud detection tool – Valid8 serves as a stronger layer of protection against ad fraud. Here’s how it helps:
Proactive click fraud detection to filter out invalid traffic
Click fraud causes damage right at the moment it happens. That’s why mFilterIt validates every click proactively, before it reaches your website or influences platform algorithms. This ensures bots, automated interactions, and low-quality clicks are filtered instantly, keeping your CPC stable and your funnel protected from the very beginning.
Source-level transparency – Know if the traffic is bot or genuine
Walled gardens don’t reveal much about where clicks come from or how they behave. Our ad fraud solution bridges that gap by providing an independent, transparent view into the source of each click and behavioural pattern, even inside closed platforms. This helps advertisers spot issues they normally can’t see, challenge misleading performance signals, and make decisions based on verified data rather than assumptions.
Device traffic blocking and Source blacklisting
Our ad fraud detection solution identifies devices and traffic sources that repeatedly generate suspicious or invalid activity. Once detected, these devices, IP clusters, and sources are automatically blacklisted to prevent future manipulation. This stops bad actors from re-entering your campaigns, protects your budgets, and ensures that only trusted, high-quality traffic is allowed into your funnel.
User Intent Scoring
Each user interaction is assessed and scored based on behaviour, patterns, and engagement depth. Genuine users display natural browsing journeys, while fraudulent or low-intent users show predictable discrepancies. By scoring intent, our tool helps advertisers prioritize real prospects, filter out invalid traffic, and optimize campaigns based on meaningful human engagement.
Read in detail how mFilterIt’s user intent mechanism works
Full-funnel visibility from click → session → lead → sign-up → revenue
Due to the closed nature of walled gardens, advertisers often lose visibility after the click. However, ad fraud doesn’t just stop at the click stage. It shows up in how users behave on your site, how forms are filled, and even how leads progress in your CRM. That’s why post-click validation becomes essential.
Our ad fraud solution connects the entire journey, from the moment a user clicks your ad to how they browse, interact, submit details, and eventually convert. This helps you see which clicks lead to meaningful actions and which ones drop off instantly or show suspicious patterns. With this full-funnel clarity, you can finally understand the true quality of your traffic, identify where invalid users enter, and make decisions based on real human behaviour instead of misleading signals.
Therefore, with mFilterIt’s layer of ad fraud protection, only clean, verified, high-intent traffic reaches your campaign funnel, improving performance and driving meaningful growth.
Way Forward
The path ahead for marketers is clear: performance only improves when the traffic entering the funnel is clean. With a validation layer in place, your campaigns stop reacting to click fraud driven traffic and start learning from real user intent. You can expect steadier CPCs, stronger audience signals, cleaner remarketing pools, and data you can finally trust.
Most importantly, your optimizations start working the way they should—driving meaningful results instead of compensating for hidden fraud.
This is how marketers move forward: by building their performance on verified clicks, accurate signals, and a funnel that reflects real demand. Seeing unexpected surge in clicks?
Get in touch with our experts to understand how to solve it.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How can I tell if my search or walled garden campaigns are being hit by click fraud?
Unusual click spikes, rising CPC, low-quality sessions, and declining conversions are strong indicators your traffic isn’t fully genuine.
2. Don’t Walled Gardens already block invalid traffic?
They do—but only for obvious patterns. Sophisticated bots mimic human behavior and often slip past native filters undetected. Marketers need an advanced click fraud prevention tool to detect sophisticated fraud patterns.
3. How does invalid traffic actually hurt my performance?
Fake clicks distort algorithm signals, push CPC higher, weaken remarketing pools, and lower the quality of leads entering your CRM.
4. Will validating clicks affect my campaign delivery or scale?
No. Removing invalid traffic improves signal quality, helping algorithms optimize faster, spend more efficiently, and scale better.
5. What results can I expect after implementing a click fraud prevention solution?
More stable CPC, cleaner analytics, higher-quality leads, stronger remarketing performance, and overall better ROAS.
