How to avoid fraudulent bot clicks on your Google Ads

The overall principle is to activate your protection with FP-API to identify low quality traffic and automatically exclude that traffic using an audience and IP exclusion.

Please note that this method does not require our API. Other methods can be used with our API but require a bit of coding on your end. This guide focuses on how to do it without coding in a few clicks.

In fingerprinting-api.com app, go to settings, integration. Copy the code. Paste it on all pages of your website, try to avoid using a tag manager like GTM. If you are not a subscriber, consider using the required plan according to your traffic.

On your CMS, create a page to which all bot traffic will be redirected. It can be pretty much anything, just make sure that it's used only for that purpose.

In the Ads protection tab, under Google Ads, click on "Connect your Google Ads Account" : 

The traffic we don't want will be redirected to that page. You must enter that URL here. Make sure it's a URL not used for anything else : 

Turn on the protection : 

Once you have done that, you will see on your Google Ads account : 

- IP ban will start being automatically populated.
- An exclusion audience will be automatically created and added to your campaigns. We check for new campaigns daily.
- Visitor that went to the page identified in step 2 will be added to the audience.

Please note : 
- Google Ads have a hard limit of 500 IPs. To manage that, we rotate IPs. We would like more, more sadly, this is something we have no control on.

- Audience exclusion will start working when we reach the treshold imposed by Google Ads for security reason. This treshold is 1000 users for Search/Gmail, 100 for Display.

If you have some coding experience, you can go further by using our API.