Ad Fraud Calculator

How Much Is Click Fraud
Costing You?

Enter your monthly ad spend and industry to estimate how much of your budget is going to fraudulent clicks, bots, and invalid traffic.

Your Campaign Details

$10,000
$1K$1M
$25
$1$200
18%
5%50%

Industry fraud rates are based on published research and may vary by campaign type, geography, and targeting.

Estimated Impact

Wasted Monthly
$1,800
Wasted Annually
$21,600
Fake Clicks/mo
72
Fake Leads/mo
2
Total clicks/mo400
Legitimate clicks/mo328
True cost per real lead$1,000

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Understanding Ad Fraud

What is click fraud?

Click fraud occurs when automated bots, click farms, or malicious actors repeatedly click on your pay-per-click ads with no intention of becoming a customer. Each click costs you money, drains your daily budget faster, and inflates your metrics with fake engagement.

How much does click fraud cost?

Industry research estimates that 14-20% of all PPC clicks are fraudulent. For high-CPC industries like legal services and insurance, this can mean thousands of dollars wasted every month. Globally, ad fraud costs advertisers over $80 billion per year.

How does ad fraud affect lead quality?

Modern click fraud bots don't just click your ads — they fill out your forms with fake information. This means your sales team wastes time following up on leads that were never real. Your reported cost per lead looks fine, but your cost per actual customer is much higher than you think.

How can you detect ad fraud?

While Google provides basic invalid click protection, sophisticated bots using residential proxies often slip through. Real-time lead scoring at the form submission level — checking IP reputation, email validity, and behavioral signals — catches what platform-level filters miss.