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Click-fraud protection for online shops.
Online shops buy lots of cheap clicks, so small fraud rates become large bills at volume. ClickTrap checks every paid click and excludes the sources that never buy.
- Typical cost per click
- £0.30–£2
- Typical invalid clicks
- 8–15%
- Wasted on £5,000 a month
- £600
Why online shops are targeted
Expensive clicks attract fake ones.
High volume
Thousands of clicks a month means even a few per cent invalid is real money.
Price scrapers and bots
Automated crawlers click Shopping ads to collect prices and stock levels.
Bots after high-value clicks
Automated traffic from data centres and headless browsers goes where clicks are worth the most, and never becomes a customer.
Repeat clickers
The same person clicking again and again, switching network or IP address so each click looks new.
What an attack looks like
A morning of ad clicks for online shops.
Every paid visit is checked as it lands: its device, its network and how it behaves. Real people get through. The rest are shut out of your campaigns, so they can’t click again.
- running shoes saleMobile, Leeds Real visitor
- standing deskData centre in Frankfurt Blocked
- running shoes saleSame device, new address Blocked
- wireless earbudsLaptop, Bristol Real visitor
- standing deskSame office network, 3rd click Fake: flagged
- gift ideas for himHeadless browser Blocked
- gift ideas for himMobile, Manchester Real visitor
An illustration of typical traffic, not a real account
The damage
How fake clicks hurt online shops
Click fraud doesn’t just waste money. It knocks on through everything your campaigns do.
Budget drain
Every fake click spends budget meant for real customers. At £0.30–£2 a click, a morning of fake traffic can use up the day before anyone real sees your ad.
Competitors take your place
When your daily budget runs out early, your ads stop showing, and a competitor’s ads fill the space for the rest of the day.
Misleading data
Invalid clicks inflate click-through rates and costs per lead, so you pause good campaigns and put money into the wrong keywords.
Missed customers
People searching later in the day never see you. Every one of them is work that goes to someone else.
Watch · 1:55
Click fraud for online shops, explained in two minutes
What online shops pay for a click, how often the clicks are fake, and how to stop them.
Warning signs
Signs your campaigns are being hit
Click fraud is built to look like real traffic. These patterns in your Google Ads data are the usual giveaways. Tick the ones you’ve seen.
Checking this by hand takes hours. It means matching IP addresses, devices and timings across campaigns every day. ClickTrap does it on every paid click, automatically.
Tick any you’ve noticed in your account.
The solution
How ClickTrap protects online shops
Every paid visit is checked the moment it lands, and sources that break your rules are excluded from your campaigns within minutes.
Click rules
Repeat clicks from one IP address or device, in minutes, hours or days: you set the limits, with sensible ones on from the start.
Device fingerprinting
Recognises the same device when it changes IP address, and catches a blocked device when it comes back.
Bot and network detection
Bad bots, headless browsers, Tor exit nodes, known attack sources and data-centre IPs; VPNs and proxies flagged for review.
Every click explained
Each paid visit is listed with its campaign, keyword and device, and the reason it was flagged or blocked.
Automatic exclusions
Offending IP addresses are added to your Google Ads campaigns’ exclusions within minutes, with manager (MCC) accounts supported.
Collective Shield
IP addresses reported by several of our customers are excluded from your campaigns the first time they click.
Advanced protection
When excluding addresses isn’t enough.
Some attacks move faster than any block list. These step in where an exclusion can’t.
14 suspicious clicks in 10 minutes. Back on in 5 minutes.
Tripwire
When fake clicks pile onto one keyword, device type or town, it’s paused in Google Ads for a few minutes, then switched back on by itself.
On Patrol, Garrison and Fortress
How Tripwire works- Plumber, Leedscaught
- Solicitor, Bristolcaught
- Locksmith, Manchestercaught
- Your accountblocked before its first click
Collective Shield
An address caught by several of our customers is blocked for you the first time it clicks your ads, before it costs you anything.
Included on Patrol, Garrison and Fortress
How it worksLoss calculator
How much could fake clicks be costing you?
Set to typical figures for e-commerce. Change them to match your account.
I run , I spend £ a month on Google Ads, and I pay about £ a click.
%
Typical UK figures for each kind of business are filled in. Change any of them to match your own Google Ads account.
Your ads run all day, but the first 1 hour 48 minutes (until about 8:48am) of every day’s budget goes on clicks that were never customers.
Estimate only. Industry figures are typical UK ranges; outside the UK, enter your own cost per click. Your real figures show in your dashboard within days.
Example
What fake clicks cost on £5,000 a month
At e-commerce’s typical £1.15 a click and 12% invalid clicks.
Without protection
- Google Ads spend a month
- £5,000
- Average cost per click
- £1.15
- Invalid clicks
- 12%
- Wasted a month
- £600
- Wasted a year
- £7,200
With ClickTrap
- Fake clicks stopped, a month
- £600
- Sentry plan, a month
- − £30
- Saved a month
- £570
- Saved a year
- £6,840
- Return on the plan
- 20×
An illustration, not a promise: prices exclude VAT, and your own figures appear in your dashboard.
Benefits
More real customers from the same budget
Protect your costliest keywords
Stop rivals and bots spending your most valuable clicks.
Trustworthy data
With fake clicks removed, your reports show what real people do, so your decisions are right.
More genuine enquiries
More of the budget reaches people who actually want what you offer.
A better return on ads
The plan usually costs far less than the fake clicks it stops.
FAQ
Questions from online shops
- Does it work with Shopping ads?
- Yes. IP exclusions apply at campaign level, so they cover Shopping and search campaigns alike.
- What about Black Friday?
- Peak weeks bring peak spend. Protection runs all the time, so there’s nothing to switch on.
- Doesn’t Google stop click fraud itself?
- Google filters some invalid clicks across its whole network and refunds some of them, often weeks later. ClickTrap looks only at your account and excludes offending sources within minutes, using rules you control.
- How quickly does protection start?
- As soon as the tracker is on your website and your Google Ads account is connected, usually within about 10 minutes. Sensible rules are on from the start.
- Will it work with my existing campaigns?
- Yes. ClickTrap adds IP exclusions to the campaigns you choose; your ads, bids and targeting stay exactly as they are.