Click Fraud Protection

With Heavyweight Digital, click fraud protection costs £25 + VAT per month. Pricing across the market varies by provider and what the tool is metered on, flat spend-based pricing stays the same as your traffic grows, while visit, session or click-based pricing rises with volume, so it’s worth comparing based on your actual ad spend rather than the headline price alone. You can see how costs stack up across the market in our best click fraud companies comparison.

Click fraud breaches Google’s own advertising policies and can constitute fraud under UK law in serious or organised cases, though prosecution is rare given the difficulty of proving intent. You can report suspected click fraud directly to Google through your Ads account, but in practice, prevention through monitoring and exclusion is far more effective than pursuing it after the fact.

Your cost per click and cost per lead will keep climbing as more of your budget goes to traffic that was never going to convert, and if it’s coming from a competitor, it can quietly continue for months without ever showing up as an obvious spike. Left unaddressed, it typically shows up as declining ROI that’s hard to explain, rather than one dramatic event.

It depends on the tool, some cover Google, Meta and Microsoft Ads under one account, while others are Google-only. If you’re running paid social alongside Google Ads, it’s worth confirming coverage across all your platforms rather than assuming one tool protects everything by default.  The best click fraud software covers more than one platform.

It’s possible but rare, since legitimate protection tools rely on multiple signals (click frequency, device fingerprinting, known bot behaviour) rather than blocking based on location or device type alone. Any properly configured setup should be monitored regularly to check for false positives, which is part of why we review exclusion lists rather than leaving them fully automated.

Blocking is typically active within hours of installation, since the tracking script needs to be live on your site and linked to your Google Ads account before it can start identifying and excluding bad traffic. Most clients see a measurable drop in suspicious clicks within the first few days, though building a fully refined exclusion list takes a few weeks as the system learns your traffic patterns.

No. Click fraud protection prevents future spend by blocking fraudulent sources from clicking your ads again, it isn’t a refund mechanism for past clicks. Google does issue automatic credits for some invalid clicks its own systems detect, but this only covers the most obvious cases, which is exactly the gap third-party protection is designed to close going forward.

It works alongside your existing campaigns regardless of who manages them, since the protection sits as a layer that excludes fraudulent traffic from your account, it doesn’t require taking over campaign management. That said, if Heavyweight Digital manages your Google Ads, we handle the setup and monitoring as part of the same account, so nothing falls between two providers.

Look for patterns rather than single clicks: a spike in clicks with no corresponding rise in calls or enquiries, repeated clicks from the same city or IP range in a short window, high bounce rates on campaigns that previously converted well, or a sudden jump in cost per click with no change in your bidding. One bad day of traffic isn’t proof, but a consistent pattern over a week or two usually is.