Click fraud and скликивание are not two problems

The invalid-clicks column in the account went up, and it looks as if the loss grew with it. More often it is the other way around. The column shows how many clicks the platform already refused to sell you.

Click fraud and скликивание are two names for one event: a click with no interest in your offer. An invalid click in the report is a third thing. It is a click the platform itself classed as empty and took off the bill. What part of an empty click stays in spend is covered in what ad click fraud is. This piece is only about the words, because the word decides which number you treat as a loss.

Click fraud is a name, not a report field

In the Google Ads guide, invalid traffic is traffic with no genuine interest in the business. The examples are bots and software, accidental clicks, fraudulent placements, and deliberate clicks by people who do not want the ad: a competitor raising your spend, and a publisher paying people to click.

«Кликфрод» is the Russian name of that event. Yandex Direct has no metric with that label. A sentence like “our click fraud is this percent” is almost always the speaker’s estimate. You can calculate an estimate. A percent that was never measured does not become a report field.

Скликивание is a complaint about the same event

Yandex does not define скликивание as a metric. On the page «Что делать, если меня скликивают» it answers the advertiser’s own words: clicks the system treats as erroneous or invalid do not enter the reports and are not charged.

Only the word changes. The click, the program and the bill stay the same. The expectation changes. People look for a row called “скликивание” and, finding none, decide there were no empty clicks. There is no row with that name. There is spend that remained, and a column of what was already removed from spend.

An invalid click is a row already struck out

Google says it directly: the invalid clicks column is traffic the systems have already filtered, and you are not charged for it. If the number grows, the filter is working. A third-party report can flag the same addresses again even though they are already off the bill.

Direct draws the same line. The antifraud guide defines invalid traffic as clicks and conversions without a real interest, and splits them into fraud and accidental clicks. What the system accepts is deleted from the reports, not charged, and the spend is returned to the shared account balance. The removed events are in the “Invalid traffic” report. Reach campaigns also get a GIVT share there: general invalid traffic caught by standard parameter checks, for example bots and search crawlers. That share exists only for reach campaigns. It is not the click-fraud percent of a search campaign, and it is not a refund total for a performance campaign.

Adding “invalid” to spend and calling the sum a loss does not work. The first number was never a loss.

A report with an empty invalid column is not a clean campaign

The filter does not promise to catch everything. What it misses stays in spend and looks like an ordinary click. Direct also keeps a real person who arrived and did not buy: the price was wrong, the service was wrong, the person was comparing. An empty invalid-traffic report means “the filter removed nothing in this period”, not “every click was a buyer”.

Some of those clicks come from software, some from a person paid to do a task. A missed click has no label that says “this was a bot”. How a program’s session on the site differs from a person’s is covered in bot or human. Traces the filter missed are collected in signs of click fraud.

Who gains from a click that stayed in spend is a separate question. A bot’s operator, a publisher and a competitor do not want the same thing, and the account signs the click, not the motive. The parties are covered in who clicks your ads.

A check on the site does not rename Direct’s column. It looks at the visit that already opened the page: behavior, the browser environment, the network and the ad-click parameters. The decision is to let the visitor through, to ask the browser to solve a short computational task, or to refuse the visit. A click Direct missed and charged can still be sent to that check. The reverse is also true. Binetro does not zero the invalid-clicks column and does not return money the platform has already decided on. If the check does not answer, the visitor is let through.