Why ad fraud is so hard to stop (And how it drains your marketing budget)

Imagine you’re running a high-budget campaign.

Your dashboard shows thousands of clicks...but barely any conversions.

You tweak your targeting, swap some creatives around, and even pause underperforming ads, but the results stay flat. Sound familiar?

That’s ad fraud at work - invisible, persistent, and profitable for everyone except you.

According to Statista, global losses from ad fraud are projected to reach $172 billion by 2028 - that's nearly double today’s figures.

This isn’t a bug in the system; it is the system!

A built-in revenue stream for shady publishers, traffic brokers, and sometimes even the platforms themselves.

Ad fraud isn’t just a technical problem though, it’s a business model, and a deeply embedded one at that, quietly profiting behind the scenes while draining your budget and distorting your campaign results.

What is ad fraud?

Ad fraud refers to any deceptive practice that manipulates digital advertising metrics to generate false impressions (where your ad's seen), clicks, or conversions.

The end goal?

To steal advertising budgets by making marketers pay for traffic or actions that aren’t real or valuable.

This can involve bots, fraudulent websites, manipulated ad placements, or even real people paid to click ads without any genuine interest.

And it’s a widespread problem affecting nearly every corner of the digital advertising world, inflating costs and skewing performance data en-masse.

How ad fraud wastes your budget

Ad fraud isn’t just a bot problem, it’s a full-blown ecosystem - one that includes bots, click farms, fake installs, and shady affiliate tactics all working toward a single goal: extracting money from your ad budget without delivering real results.

Some of it is automated, with massive botnets mimicking human behaviour, clicking on your ads, watching videos, and loading landing pages...just enough to pass through those basic filters. Other fraud is human-powered: think click farms where real people spend all day tapping ads on low-end devices for pennies.

And here’s the real kicker: platforms often don’t have a strong financial incentive or the technical resource to stop it.

Every fake impression still generates revenue, and every bot click still moves your budget.

Fraud inflates your engagement metrics, makes publishers look better than they are, and keeps the ad money flowing, even if no actual customers ever see your offer.

Whys it so harmful?

• You'll end up wasting money on fake clicks, fake views, and fake installs.
• You make bad decisions, thinking one audience or creative is performing well when it’s just bot traffic.
• You lose trust in your data, meaning your marketing strategy becomes guesswork.
• You get outbid by fraudsters, forcing you to spend more just to stay visible in auctions filled with junk traffic.

In short, ad fraud skews your marketing performance reality, drains performance budgets, and creates the illusion that your campaigns are working, when they’re really being siphoned off behind the scenes.

Why is ad fraud so hard to stop?

Ad fraud is notoriously difficult to eliminate because:‍

• Financial incentives are misaligned: Platforms and publishers profit from volume, so flagging fraud can mean quickly losing revenue.
• ‍Fraud tactics constantly evolve: As soon as one method is detected, fraudsters adapt with new tricks, making detection a never-ending game of cat and mouse.
• Traffic sources are complex and opaque: Programmatic advertising involves multiple intermediaries, making it hard to trace where bad traffic actually originates.
• Detection tools often rely on reactive measures: Most solutions identify fraud after it happens, leaving advertisers exposed in real-time, with limited tools they can use to fight back.
• Human-driven fraud mimics legitimate behavior: Click farms and incentivized traffic looks a lot like real users, making automated detection somewhat challenging.

Because of these factors, most tools can’t completely eliminate ad fraud - but with the right combination of proactive detection and real-time action, you can significantly reduce its impact and protect your marketing budget.

The difference between ad fraud & click fraud

Let’s break it down in its simplest form:

• Ad fraud is the broad umbrella and it includes any deception used to game the advertising ecosystem - think fake traffic, fake installs, faked impressions etc.
• Click fraud is one specific form and is the deliberate manipulation of pay-per-click (PPC) ads by generating illegitimate clicks, usually with the intention of wasting competitor budgets.

Think of click fraud as the street-level scammer, while ad fraud is the full-blown crime ring.

The type of ad fraud (and what they really mean)

Here’s what modern ad fraud actually looks like:

• Botnet ad fraud: Large networks of infected devices generate fake traffic or simulate user interactions, all without real human users behind them.
• Click hijacking: Legitimate clicks are secretly redirected to ads, stealing user actions that are meant for another destination.
• Hidden ads: These are ads rendered invisibly in the background - you never see them, but impressions are still logged and billed.
• Ad stacking: Multiple ads layered on top of each other in a single placement. Only the top one is visible, but everyone gets charged.
• Fake app installs: Bots mimic app install flows or real user journeys to inflate CPI (cost-per-install) metrics and drain mobile ad budgets.
• Cookie stuffing: Dropping cookies on users without consent so fraudsters can claim commission for conversions they never earned.
• Ad injection: Malware or browser extensions inject ads into legitimate sites, hijacking impressions and traffic.

Each one is designed to look legit and fool both advertisers and platforms.

Who’s most at risk of ad fraud?

Whilst ad fraud can affect anyone, some advertisers are more vulnerable than others.

If you're in any of these groups, you're a prime target:

• High-volume PPC advertisers with more budget means more to steal.
• Niche industries with high CPCs (cost-per-clicks)...fraudsters love to follow the money.
• Performance marketers obsessed with conversions. Its easy to manipulate if you’re not watching what happens post-click.
• Mobile-first brands - these are especially exposed to fake installs and SDK-based fraud.
• Anyone relying solely on basic platform analytics - if you're not measuring beyond the click, you're flying blind.

How to protect yourself from ad fraud

Fighting ad fraud starts with smarter visibility and sharper tools.

Here’s how to stay one step ahead:

• Use post-click analytics tools (like Hitprobe 👋) that track user behavior, not just clicks and impressions.
• Segment traffic by source and behavior to spot those sketchy anomalies fast
• Leverage behavioral fingerprints, track how real users move and interact, and flag traffic that doesn’t match.
• Block repeat offenders using unique device IDs, IP intelligence, and referrer data.
• Audit your partners - low-quality traffic usually comes from poorly monitored placements.
• Implement pre-bid and post-bid filtering to cut bad traffic at both ends.

The key to success? Go beyond PPC platforms basic surface-level metrics.

Sure, they might give you a refund for “invalid traffic,” but that’s just a band-aid without any guarantees (or an actual fix to the problem).

Why your website analytics probably needs a rethink

Standard website analytics tools (yes, we're looking at you, GA4) simply weren’t built for fraud visibility or transparency.

They track page views, bounce rates, and maybe give you some UTM data...but they don’t give you the post-click analytics that show who clicked and what they did next when they landed on your website.

To stop digital ad fraud, you need:

• Real-time insight into conversion paths
• Clear segmentation between paid, organic, and suspicious traffic
• Signals from user behavior, not just metadata

That’s exactly where Hitprobe changes the game.

The best ad fraud prevention tool

We’re not an ad blocker, we’re not another dashboard product with pretty charts, and we're not industry snake oil (yep, still a hot topic!).

Hitprobe is a behavioral and analytics engine that tracks users after they click - whether it’s from a paid ad, organic traffic, or tagged source directed to your site.

That means you can:

• Detect fake clicks before they bounce, leveraging stable device fingerprinting to lock onto the device.
• Uncover click fraud from any of your paid campaigns to help you tweak and refine your campaign settings to get the best for your budget.
• See which traffic sources are feeding your site junk and manage shady referrer domains.
• Take action instantly to block, exclude, and optimize as you go.

Because here’s the truth: tools that detect and protect against click fraud also help stop the wider web of ad fraud.

When you clean up your clicks, you also clean up your campaigns.

Ad fraud isn't going anywhere, but you can outsmart it

Ad fraud isn’t just a line item in your budget, it’s a silent tax on every impression, click, and conversion you pay for.

Sure, it’s notoriously hard to kill, but it’s not impossible to fight.

The key is knowing what you’re up against: botnets, fake users, hidden ads, hijacked clicks, shady placements etc, so you know how to respond - because the worst thing you can do is nothing.

With the right strategy and the right tools, you can stop feeding fraudsters and start taking back control of your ad performance.

Try Hitprobe for free for 14 days, take back control of your campaigns, and close the door on ad fraud.