Enter your monthly ad spend and pick an invalid-traffic assumption to see a rough estimate of how much could be wasted on clicks that never convert. Every preset is anchored to a published 2025 industry benchmark.
Global invalid-click rate on web traffic, Q2 2025 (Pixalate).
€950
Estimated wasted per month
€11,400
Estimated wasted per year
€34,200
Estimated wasted over 3 years
This is an estimate for illustration only — your chosen rate applied to your spend — not a measurement or a guarantee. Actual invalid-traffic levels vary by campaign, industry, region and device.
Click fraud is not a rounding error. Independent measurement firms put a meaningful share of every advertising budget on the line.
19%
of clicks on web traffic were invalid globally (Q2 2025, Pixalate)
29%
of clicks inside mobile apps were invalid globally (Q2 2025, Pixalate)
$84B
of global ad spend lost to fraud in 2023 (Juniper Research)
~22%
of digital ad spend lost to fraud, year after year (Juniper Research)
Pixalate publishes quarterly click-fraud benchmarks from billions of programmatic transactions. Rates vary widely — pick the scenario in the calculator that best matches where and how you advertise.
Figures show the share of clicks (or impressions, for Connected TV) flagged as invalid. Source: Pixalate Q1 & Q2 2025 click-fraud and ad-fraud benchmark reports.
Invalid clicks are not random. A handful of recurring patterns account for most of the budget that never reaches a real customer.
Repeated and scripted clicks on the same ad. In EMEA, duplicate clicks alone made up 40% of all invalid desktop-web clicks in Q1 2025 (Pixalate).
Coordinated networks of low-cost devices manufacturing clicks at scale. Click-farm activity accounted for 42% of invalid mobile-web clicks across EMEA in Q1 2025 (Pixalate).
Non-human traffic from bots, crawlers and servers in data centres — the kind of general invalid traffic (GIVT) that the IAB and MRC define and that platforms filter unevenly.
The estimate simply multiplies your monthly spend by the invalid-traffic rate you select — nothing is hidden. The presets are anchored to independent 2025 benchmarks: Pixalate measured a 19% global invalid-click rate on web traffic in Q2 2025, rising to 24% on desktop web across EMEA in Q1 2025. Separately, Juniper Research estimates around 22% of global digital ad spend — roughly $84 billion — was lost to fraud in 2023.
Start a free trial and ProtectAds will show you exactly how much invalid traffic hits your campaigns.
