click-fraud-protection

A server-side block happens after the click has already been billed: the visitor clicked, Google charged you, and your site then refused to load for them. A campaign IP exclusion works earlier, preventing the ad from being shown to that address at all, so there is no click and no cost. Only the second one saves money, which is why it matters how a tool applies its blocking.

Google does issue automatic credits for clicks it judges invalid, and those arrive whether or not you run anything else. The catch is that Google does not disclose the criteria it uses, so you cannot tell what was caught and what was not. A protection tool works on the clicks you can see and identify yourself, and it prevents repeat sources rather than refunding them afterwards.

Give it a month. Blocking only applies to clicks that have not happened yet, so the tool needs time to observe repeat sources before it has anything to exclude. Two weeks of data is usually too noisy to separate a real change from ordinary week-to-week variation in your account. Run it on one campaign, keep another as a control, and compare cost per conversion across a full month.

It can, and this is the risk worth watching. Shared office networks, large employers and some mobile carriers put many genuine people behind one address, so an over-aggressive rule can shut out buyers. The signal to watch is cost per conversion. If your clicks fall but your leads fall with them, blocking is hitting real people and the settings need loosening or the tool needs turning off.

Not in the same way. Performance Max does not support IP exclusions, so the mechanism that prevents an ad being shown to a flagged address has nothing to act on. A protection tool can still record and report the traffic reaching your site from PMax, which is useful for spotting patterns, but it cannot stop the clicks being served. Any vendor claiming otherwise is worth questioning.

It depends on your cost per click rather than your total budget. A small budget spent on clicks that cost a few dollars each can lose real money to repeat invalid traffic, while a larger budget on cheap clicks may not. Multiply your average cost per click by the clicks a trial blocks in a month. If that number is not clearly bigger than the subscription, skip it.

Click fraud protection is software that monitors visitors arriving from your paid search ads, identifies the ones that show signs of automation or repeat abuse, and adds them to your Google Ads exclusion list so your ads stop being shown to them. The goal is not to catch every bad click. It is to stop the same worthless sources from costing you money over and over.