Start with what cannot be undone
A click that has already been charged is charged. No landing-page tool can reverse it, and any tool implying otherwise is selling you a feeling. Everything below affects future serving or future decisions.
It is also worth knowing what has already happened without you: Google runs its own invalid-traffic filtering and removes a substantial share of automated activity before it ever reaches your bill. What a landing-page monitor sees is what got through that filter and reached your site. That is a smaller number than the industry advertises — and it is one you can check.
Option 1 — Keep watching
Frequently the right answer. A pattern seen on two days is thin; the same pattern on nine days is a different object. Nothing is lost by letting it accumulate, and a decision made on more evidence is a better decision. A monitoring tool that pushes you to act immediately is optimising for feeling useful, not for being right.
Option 2 — Exclude the address in Google Ads
Google supports IP exclusions at campaign level, and this is the one lever that changes what happens next. It is worth being precise about its limits:
- Up to 500 addresses per campaign, per Google's documentation.
- Campaign-level IP exclusions do not apply to Performance Max, Video, App, Hotel or Smart Display campaigns.
- It affects future ad serving only. Nothing already billed changes.
- Google notes that an excluded address can still appear in your web logs — an exclusion governs ad serving, not the whole internet.
Because it is a real change to a live account, ClickSheriff requires a person to approve each address, records who approved it and why, and lets you revoke it later. The step-by-step guide covers the mechanics.
Option 3 — Fix the campaign, not the address
Often the more durable answer. Patterns cluster: a particular keyword, a particular placement, a particular hour, a particular country you do not actually serve. Excluding one address after another is whack-a-mole; tightening the targeting that keeps attracting them is not. Findings are useful partly as a pointer to which setting to look at.
Option 4 — Ask Google to look at it
Google operates an invalid-activity investigation process, and per-click data is what it asks for. ClickSheriff Pro can export that data — timestamps, addresses, user agents, click identifiers, campaigns — in a shape suited to that request.
What we will not tell you is that this results in a credit. Google decides that itself, on criteria it does not publish, and we have no visibility into or influence over the outcome. Treat the export as the ability to ask properly, not as an expected refund.
What none of this is
ClickSheriff does not hide your phone number from anyone, does not redirect visitors away, and does not decide who reaches your site. An earlier version could do the first of those and it was removed, because a rule based on network origin will eventually hide a business's contact details from a real customer on a corporate VPN — silently, and invisibly to the owner. Preventing one questionable click is not worth losing one real one.
