10–20% of your ad budget buys nothing

Open your Google Ads report for last month. Clicks, cost, conversions, cost per conversion. Every number reconciles. Nothing looks wrong.

That is exactly the problem.

A click from a data centre in Frankfurt and a click from a customer in Leeds cost the same and sit in the same row. The report cannot separate them, because it was never built to. It tells you what you were charged for. It cannot tell you who was on the other end.

Industry estimates put invalid traffic somewhere in the range of 10–20% of paid clicks. Take the bottom of that range on a modest account: £5,000 a month at £4 a click is 1,250 clicks. Ten per cent is 125 clicks — about £500 — spent on visits that never had a chance of becoming a sale.

Who is clicking?

• —Bots and scrapers — price crawlers, SEO tools, automation running in data centres.
• —Click farms — cheap, high volume, often routed through residential proxies.
• —Competitors — sometimes deliberate, sometimes just checking your ad ten times a week.
• —Accidental repeats — mis-taps on mobile, back-and-forth clicking.

Google runs its own invalid-traffic filtering on every click and issues automatic credits for what it catches. That system is built to protect the platform across millions of accounts, and it works from the click itself — the address it came from, its timing, its shape.

What it cannot see is what happened next. Whether the page rendered. Whether a mouse moved. Whether the session lasted longer than a heartbeat. Whether the same click ID turned up three times.

That layer is visible from one place only: your own site.

SaveMyBudget puts a single lightweight tag on your site, records click and session metadata, and flags the clicks matching invalid patterns — with the reason attached to each one. Where the evidence supports it, we prepare and file a claim for Google to review. Google decides every claim.