Invalid clicks in VK Ads: how to find them and cut them off

On the VK Ads help pages that describe placements, the auction, fast spend, and click verification, there is no column of invalid clicks and no refund for them. Invalid clicks in the sense of a report that removes a click and returns the money are not shown on these pages. They do not diagnose click fraud either. What they have instead of such a report is below: a choice of large placements, a second-price auction, reasons for fast spend, and a link wrapper for audit.

Places are chosen with checkboxes, not a domain blocklist

Ads have automatic placement selection turned on by default. The help lists the places as Odnoklassniki, VKontakte, VK projects, the ad network (the examples are Youla, Avito, Auto.ru, and Edadeal), and RuStore for apps from RuStore. To keep only some of them, on the ad-group step in the “Placement” block you turn off automatic places and clear the extra checkboxes. That page suggests judging ad effectiveness by CTR, CPC, CPM, and conversion.

This is a choice of large placements, not the exclusion of one network domain by name. Clearing the “ad network” checkbox removes the network as listed, not one domain inside it. The page has no invalid-click or refund column, so a checkbox does not replace a reading of the click.

A second-price auction and three eCPM formulas

A campaign budget is either daily or for the whole period. The auction runs when a person opens a placement, among the ads aimed at that person, by eCPM. The winner pays the previous participant’s bid: a second-price auction, payment per impression. The help defines CTR as clicks / impressions × 100%. CR is a goal action / clicks × 100%.

The first estimate of CTR and CR comes from a model on the history of the goal and the targetings in the category. After a sufficient number of conversions, the ad’s own figures enter the model. The page does not translate “sufficient” into a number. It does not write about invalid clicks or about subtracting them from eCPM. The formula figures are the placement’s help.

A fast rise in CTR in this formula raises eCPM for clicks and for actions. The page does not say that part of the clicks in CTR was removed as invalid. There is nowhere to look for “cut” clicks inside eCPM: the page has no subtraction.

The help explains fast spend without bots

The page “Why the budget is spent quickly” names the reasons: a harder goal needs a higher bid, a wide and active audience gets impressions faster, a larger budget is spent faster, and a bid that is low relative to the market slows impressions. The algorithm, the help says, wants to spread the budget evenly, but it can spend it at once if impressions are cheaper now or people are more likely to convert.

For a smoother spend the page suggests changing the goal action, narrowing the audience, picking hours when the audience is less active, and, for media campaigns, setting an impression frequency. Bots, invalid clicks, and a money refund are not named on this page. This is an explanation of spend speed, not a fraud diagnosis. A morning when the budget left quickly is read on this page first as the bid, the width of the audience, and a moment of cheap impressions, not as a refund column.

“Click verification” ties a click to a pixel

The click-verification markup page explains how to wrap the destination URL in a verifier link so that, in campaigns under audit, VK Ads pixel conversions are tied to a click. For AdRiver, the {{clickid}} macro is passed in rb_clickid through a custom parameter, starting at number 11. The example of the final parameter is custom=11={{campaign_id}};{{banner_id}};{{clickid}}. A conversion after the click is written into the “Conversions” metric group and tied to a specific click.

The page does not describe filtering invalid clicks, a column of such clicks, or a credit for them. The word “verification” here is about a verifier such as AdRiver accounting for the click. Wrapping the link ties a pixel conversion to a click in a campaign under audit. It does not produce a list of clicks to refund.

Whether Yandex returns money for click fraud does not belong to these VK Ads pages: they are about another account and do not describe a refund. Who clicks an ad is covered in the article on who clicks ads. The difference in terms is in the article on click fraud and sklikivanie.

On these pages, a place in VK Ads can be cut off with a checkbox of a large placement. A column of invalid clicks cannot be found on them: it is not in placements, not in the auction, not in the explanation of fast spend, and not in link verification.