Google Ads employs sophisticated automated defenses to protect your campaigns from invalid traffic, and from serving in placements that violate Google’s AdSense Program policies. While most of these defenses are applied in real-time to protect advertiser campaigns and prevent them from being billed for associated traffic, some activity is identified after an invoice has been issued. Invalid activity credits are issued for associated advertiser spend, where appropriate and possible.
While credits for invalid activity are also reported as line-item adjustments in your billing and transaction history, the Invalid Activity Credit Report breaks these credits down by campaign and network. The report also includes the number of clicks and interactions associated with the credits, allowing you to track how this activity impacted your campaign performance. By providing a clear view of your "net" performance after credits are applied, these reports enable more accurate optimization and offer enhanced transparency into Google’s protection measures.
On this page
- Benefits
- Understand how Invalid Activity Credit Report works
- Access your Invalid Activity Credit report
- Considerations around Invalid Activity Credit Report
Benefits
Additional data on invalid activity credits helps you manage your budget more effectively and evaluate your true performance.
- View performance after the billing period: Get a precise view of your adjusted cost, adjusted clicks, adjusted interactions, and more after all invalid traffic and invalid activity credits applied during the billing period to-date have been subtracted.
- Reduce manual reconciliation: Eliminate the need to manually reconcile credits back to specific campaigns to determine performance.
- Increased transparency: Understand exactly how Google’s ongoing invalid activity protections directly safeguard your specific campaign spend.
Understand how the Invalid Activity Credit Report works
Invalid activity includes invalid traffic, as well as ad interactions that were later determined to be on inventory that violates one of Google’s AdSense Program policies. Invalid traffic refers to clicks and interactions on ads that aren’t a result of genuine user interest, including intentionally fraudulent traffic and accidental or duplicate clicks.
Google relies on a sophisticated, layered approach to protecting advertisers from invalid activity and invalid traffic. While most of these protections apply in real-time to protect advertiser campaigns and prevent them from being billed for associated traffic, we continue to evaluate ad interactions after the billing period has ended. When invalid activity is detected after an invoice has been generated, credits are issued for associated advertiser spend, where appropriate and possible.
While invalid activity credits are also reported in advertisers’ billing and transaction history and on subsequent invoices, this new report helps advertisers understand what campaigns and inventory these credits are associated with, and how they impact key performance metrics alongside existing reporting for invalid traffic. This new report helps you track the following:
- Invalid activity detected and filtered before your invoice is finalized.
- Invalid activity detected after your invoice is finalized, for which you receive credits.
Access your Invalid Activity Credit Report
You can find the Invalid Activity Credit Report in the Report Editor within your Google Ads account. To access this report, follow the steps below:
- Go to Report Editor within the Campaigns menu
.
- Under the ”Template gallery” section, select Invalid Activity Credit Report: Search & PMax.
- The report will populate the standard set of campaign performance metrics, new “credited clicks”, “credited interactions”, and “credited amount” columns. Users can drag and drop additional performance metrics (including “adjusted” metrics that subtract credited clicks, interactions, and cost) as they see fit.
- To save your report, select Save or Save as. “Save as” lets you create a copy of your report with a new name.
New metrics for invalid activity reporting
The following metrics will be provided in the Invalid Activity Credit Report. These columns will be added to the report by default. You can add and remove metrics as necessary.
- Credited clicks: The number of clicks that you received an invalid activity credit for after the billing period ended.
- Credited interactions: The number of interactions that you received an invalid activity credit for after the billing period ended.
- Credited amount: The amount credited back to you for invalid activity detected after the billing period ended. You only pay for valid clicks and interactions.
- Adjusted cost: Your invoiced campaign cost minus the invalid activity credit.
- Adjusted clicks: The number of clicks minus any credited clicks.
- Adjusted interactions: The number of total interactions minus any credited interactions.
- Adjusted CTR: Adjusted clickthrough rate is calculated by dividing the adjusted clicks on your ad by the number of times your ad was shown. This might be lower than your initial reported CTR if invalid clicks were detected after the billing period ended.
- Adjusted Avg. CPC: The total amount you’ve paid for your ad divided by your adjusted clicks. This might be higher than your initial reported average CPC if invalid clicks were detected after the billing period ended.
- Adjusted conv. rate: Adjusted conversion rate shows how often an ad led to a conversion, based on your adjusted interactions. This rate excludes invalid clicks and interactions to help you get a clearer view of your campaign performance.
- Adjusted cost / conv.: Adjusted cost per conversion shows how much a conversion cost, on average, based on your adjusted cost and conversions. This calculation excludes costs for any invalid activity detected after the billing period ended to help you get a clearer view of your campaign performance.
Considerations around the Invalid Activity Credit Report
- Month-end processing and cutoff times: Certain clicks or interactions may occur just before the billing cycle closes but are identified as invalid activity immediately after. In these instances, the original click is attributed to the month in which it occurred, while the corresponding credit is applied to the subsequent month. This can result in a slight timing mismatch between interaction reporting and credit issuance.
- Rounding adjustments: Minor discrepancies may occasionally occur due to the rounding of monthly credit totals. These variances are typically at the minimum billable unit and don’t significantly impact the overall reporting accuracy or the total credit amount issued.
Request an investigation
If you're having issues with invalid clicks, poor quality form submissions, clicks outside of location targeting, or sudden short-term cost increases, you can submit an investigation request using the Click Quality Form.
