Click Farms

A click farm is a group of people paid to click ads, install apps, watch videos or like posts on instruction rather than out of real interest, usually working side by side with many phones or computers. Because the people doing the clicking are real, click farm traffic gets past many bot filters.

What is a click farm?

The Media Rating Council’s (MRC) IVT 2.0 standard classifies click farms as “incentivized human invalid activity.” It defines this as activity that is not generated by machines but can be identified as organized and directed across many users or devices. Openly disclosed reward programs, where users know they are getting something for viewing or installing, are not counted as fraud (MRC, Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Standards Addendum, June 2020).

Google Ads describes the same thing as “other invalid user activity”: deliberate interactions from real people with no genuine interest in the ad, such as a competitor clicking to burn through your budget or a publisher paying others to click ads (Google Ads Help, About invalid traffic, accessed October 2026). Advertisers running Google Ads in Vietnam often call these people “click tặc,” roughly “click pirates.”

How do click farms make money?

• Draining a competitor’s budget: clicking a rival’s search ads so their budget runs out early.
• Inflating publisher revenue: a publisher hires people to click the ads on its own site to collect a bigger revenue share.
• Collecting CPI payouts: installing an app and opening it a few times so the network gets paid for each install. Google Play bans even human actions designed to generate invalid ad traffic (Google Play Console Help, Ad Fraud, accessed October 2026).
• Selling engagement: likes, follows and views for social media accounts.

Warning signs

Any single click from a click farm looks like it came from a real person, so you have to look for patterns across the whole group:

• Lots of clicks or installs bunched into one time window, one area and a handful of device models.
• IP addresses rotated through VPNs or proxies, while the device time zone and language do not match the location.
• Installs that open the app once or twice and then abandon it, with day-7 retention close to zero.
• Sign-up forms filled with phone numbers nobody answers.

What can Google Ads advertisers do?

Google filters invalid traffic automatically before charging you. Add the Invalid clicks column to your campaign table to see how many clicks were filtered out.

You can exclude up to 500 IP addresses per campaign, and Google Ads now supports account-level IP exclusions that also cover Performance Max, Demand Gen and YouTube (Google Ads Help, Exclude IP addresses, accessed October 2026). This only stops groups working from fixed IPs. When a click farm keeps rotating IPs, your block list is always one step behind.

Example (hypothetical)

A dental clinic spends VND 1.5 million a day on the keyword “trồng răng implant” (dental implants). Between 8 and 9 a.m., the campaign gets 60 clicks and runs out of budget without a single phone call, yet the Invalid clicks column shows only 5. The clinic should split its budget by time of day, check the IPs in its server logs and send Google an investigation request with that data attached.

Click farms vs. phone farms vs. bots

The lines between these terms are blurry. See also phone farms, bots and the broader overview of click fraud.

Frequently asked questions

Does Google refund money lost to click farms?

Not in cash. Clicks filtered before the billing period closes are never charged, and clicks caught afterward come back as an “Invalid activity” credit on the next invoice.

Is it a problem to buy likes or installs from a service?

Yes. Fake numbers skew every optimization decision that follows, and both Google Ads and Google Play treat interactions that do not come from genuine interest as invalid.

If your search campaigns are showing signs of malicious clicking, the Adtek team can go through the data with you. Reach us through our contact page.