How to Fight The Silent Threat to Your PMAX Campaigns: Fake Clicks and Fraudulent Conversions

So, you are a paid search expert working for a brand/business who has recently witnessed your PMAX campaign dashboard light up with impressive metrics—hundreds of clicks, dozens of conversions, and a surge in calls. 

At first glance, it seems like your ad dollars are finally delivering big wins. But when you dig deeper, the story uncovers a hidden leaf. The calls never connected, the conversions didn’t result in sales, and your budget? It’s vanishing faster than ever.

Welcome to the hidden menace of fake clicks and fraudulent conversions. For paid search advertisers and business owners, this isn’t just a pain in the nether regions—it’s a costly problem that can derail even the most well-crafted campaigns.

Over the past 12+ years, we at Mavlers have seen it all: click farms gaming the system, bots inflating performance metrics, and ad budgets wasted on phantom interactions. 

But here’s the good news: AdWords click fraud prevention is possible. In this blog, our SEM expert, Amit Barman, uncovers how fraud infiltrates PMAX campaigns, shows you the red flags to watch for, and shares actionable strategies deployed by Mavlers to safeguard your ad spend.

Table of contents

• Uncovering the dream vs reality scenario of PMax campaigns
• An insight into the rise of fake clicks and click farms
• How Mavlers protects your ad spend

Stick with us—because by the end of this, you’ll have the tools and insights to turn your campaigns into fraud-proof success stories. Let’s dive in.

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Uncovering the dream vs reality scenario of PMax campaigns

On the surface, PMAX campaigns look like the perfect tool for advertisers. They promise to deliver amazing results in minimum time by automating everything right from ad placements to optimization decisions. But the reality might be a different ballgame altogether!

Many businesses not unlike yours report astonishing increases in clicks, calls, and conversions. Yet, when they dig deeper, they find these metrics don’t correlate with actual customer engagement. 

Instead, to their utter dismay, they discover telltale signs of fraud: calls that never connected, traffic from suspicious sources, and conversions that don’t translate into sales or leads.

For example, imagine you run a local business, and your campaign metrics show a surge in calls. Excited, you check your call logs, only to find no one ever spoke with your team. What’s happening?

Source (Yep, we feel ya’ fellas!) 

In many cases, bots or click farms are generating fake calls, tricking Google’s algorithms into believing your campaign is performing exceptionally well. And as a result, more of your budget is funneled toward these “high-performing” but fraudulent sources.

This is where the promise of automation starts to feel like a trap.

An insight into the rise of fake clicks and click farms

The rise of click farms and bots is one of the most baffling issues in digital advertising today. These fraudulent entities are designed to simulate human engagement—clicking on ads, making calls, or even filling out forms. And while they’re great at gaming the system, they provide zero value for your business.

PMAX campaigns are often the easiest kid on the block to pick on because they rely heavily on third-party sites to serve ads. Unfortunately, some of these sites are low-quality or outright fraudulent. Instead of targeting potential customers, your ads may be shown on dubious websites that exist solely to generate fake interactions.

Marketers have voiced their genuine concerns, particularly on forums like Reddit, where discussions about click farms and wasted budgets are all too common. 

Every fake click strains your budget and dilutes the true performance of your campaign, making it harder to gauge what’s working and what isn’t.

How Mavlers can help with AdWords click fraud prevention

At Mavlers, we believe that every advertising dollar should work for you—not for bots, click farms, or fraudulent websites. Over time, we’ve developed a proven strategy to identify and combat fake clicks and fraudulent conversions. Here’s how we do it:

1. Smarter location targeting: Focusing on real customers

Google’s default location settings are often too broad, allowing ads to appear in areas prone to suspicious traffic. We fine-tune these settings, using the “Presence: People in or regularly in your included locations” option. This ensures your ads reach actual customers within your target region while filtering out irrelevant or fraudulent traffic.

2. Customizing content suitability settings

In our experience, fraudulent traffic often thrives in specific ad placements, like live streams or low-quality apps.

Our team closely examines and customizes settings to exclude sensitive content and untrustworthy placements like live streams and certain app categories. This way, we avoid ad placements where bot traffic is often quite prolific.

3. Cross-verification of conversions: Trust but verify

Metrics don’t lie—or do they? Automated conversion tracking in PMAX campaigns is convenient, but it’s not always accurate. That’s why we cross-verify reported conversions with client-side tracking systems.

For example, if PMAX reports 100 calls but your phone system only logged 30, we dig deeper. Often, these discrepancies point to bot-driven activity. By identifying and fixing these anomalies, we ensure your campaign metrics reflect genuine customer interactions.

4. Demanding accountability from Google

When we see unusual traffic patterns or suspect click-farm activity, we report these incidents to Google. 

We believe that transparency is important, and therefore, actively seek refunds for traffic that doesn’t align with legitimate user behavior.

5. Refining conversion goals for clearer data

Not all conversions are created equal. Actions like email clicks or PDF downloads, while valuable, don’t always lead to immediate business results. To avoid skewed metrics, we:

• Set minor interactions as secondary conversion goals.

• Focus primary goals on high-value actions like purchases, form submissions, or phone calls.

This approach provides a clearer picture of your campaign’s performance and helps minimize the impact of bot-driven engagements. It also ensures we optimize for the metrics that matter most to your business.

The road ahead

Managing PMAX campaigns isn’t just about setting them up and letting them run—it’s about constant vigilance, optimization, and refinement. By taking these proactive steps, we at Mavlers ensure that every dollar you spend drives meaningful results, not wasted clicks. 

We now suggest reading ~ What Does Mavlers Tech Expertise And Tool Stack Look Like?