Why the obvious conclusion is often the wrong one
When ad spend rises and enquiries do not, "someone is scamming me" is a natural thought, and occasionally correct. It is also the explanation that is hardest to check and easiest to sell you something against. Several duller explanations produce identical symptoms, and they are far more common.
The signs, and what each one really means
Clicks up, leads flat. Consistent with automated traffic. Equally consistent with a broken form, a slow landing page, a keyword that started matching something irrelevant, or a competitor undercutting your offer. Check the form first — it is free and it is the most common answer.
Clicks from places you do not serve. Often a targeting setting rather than an attack. Google's location options include people interested in your area, not only those in it, and that setting surprises a lot of advertisers.
Budget gone early in the day. Normal for a campaign whose budget is below what its keywords could spend. Worth looking at bidding and scheduling before assuming intent.
High bounce, no engagement. Sometimes automation. Also what a mismatched ad promise, a slow page or an intrusive popup produces.
A competitor who benefits. A motive, not evidence. It is worth remembering that repeatedly clicking a rival's ads is an obvious and well-known behaviour, which is why Google filters a great deal of it before billing.
How to actually find out
Measurement beats suspicion, and it costs nothing.
- Confirm you are measuring anything. Turn on auto-tagging in Google Ads and check that paid visits arrive carrying a click identifier. Without this, every conclusion after it is guesswork — and this is where a surprising number of investigations quietly end.
- Give it about a week. Roughly 30 paid visits across 7 days before drawing conclusions. A pattern needs to repeat to be a pattern.
- Separate billed from unbilled. Much of what looks alarming was never charged. Only what Google plausibly billed is worth your attention.
- Look for corroboration. One signal is a coincidence. Two independent ones agreeing, on many days, is a finding.
- Read the counter-evidence. Did that address convert? Did it spend two minutes reading? Those facts belong in the decision.
What a clean answer is worth
If measurement is sound and nothing repeats, that is a genuine result: your budget is reaching real people, and the problem is somewhere else — the offer, the page, the targeting. That is more useful than a fabricated percentage, and it is the answer a monitoring tool should be equally willing to give.
ClickSheriff is free to install and will tell you which of the four states you are actually in, including "there is nothing here to act on".
