Yes, bots click on ads and sites too - FouAnalytics data

Bots fake clicks on ads

Yeah, we may rationalize the absurd number of clicks as "fat thumb" or "accidental." But that's just covering up the fact that bots click on ads too, in order to trick the optimization algorithms into thinking the ads were "performing."

Note the large red circle in the click chart data from FouAnalytics in-ad measurement below. The large red circle means repeated clicks on the exact same pixel (x,y coordinate) on screen. Can you get a whole bunch of humans to click exactly the same pixel on screen? Of course not. Bots are seen here clicking on the ad to drive up the click through rate and make the advertiser spend more on fraudulent sites and apps.

For contrast, see the touch charts below. Humans have to touch the screen on their smartphone in order to click something. The data below shows touch events measured by FouAnalytics, clicking on a 300x250 ad unit. In FouAnalytics, the blue dot is the start of the touch and the orange dot is the end of the touch event.

Bots fake clicks on sites

Not only does FouAnalytics show you the dark red (bot/fraud) clicks that got to your site (left side donut chart), FouAnalytics also shows you the clicks that happened on your site (right side click charts). Note the location of the clicks; these are not natural human clicks. These are all faked bot clicks, used to trick the PMax algorithms into thinking there was "engagement" on the site.

Do any of your current fraud verification vendors show you this kind of detail? Do they even measure on your landing pages? Of course not. Time to upgrade your ad verification and site analytics too. Advanced advertisers use both FouAnalytics in-ad tags to measure where their ads go and FouAnalytics on-site tags to measure the quality of the visitors that arrive on the landing pages/websites.

Now, if you understand the above, then you are ready to consider the following: Most ad fraud doesn't involve bots any more