Why is My Google Display Campaign Getting Junk Clicks?

Google’s Display Network reaches millions of websites and apps. By default settings, a large share of your budget can end up on placements your customers would never visit. Junk clicks can be fixed, though. It takes time and a regular habit of checking where your money goes.

Where are the junk clicks coming from?

Most junk clicks in a prospecting campaign come from a few predictable places:

• Mobile app inventory. Games and utility apps show ads in full-screen pop-ups and next to buttons people tap all the time. Many of those clicks are accidental, and the visitor is back in the app before your page has even loaded.
• Made-for-advertising (MFA) sites. These sites buy cheap traffic and fill their pages with ad slots, often set to refresh automatically. Your ad gets an impression, sometimes a click, but the visitor came for a slideshow or quiz, not for you.
• Parked and misspelt domains. Pages with little or no content that exist only to show ads, often picking up visitors who typed the wrong web address.
• Invalid and bot traffic. Google filters out some of it, but not all. It usually shows up as a burst of clicks from one placement with almost no time on site.
• Placements that look fine but aren’t your audience. A real, reputable site can still send you the wrong people. For example, a news site’s puzzle section rarely delivers buyers for a B2B service.

You’ll usually spot it in your results. Lots of clicks, a nice low cost per click, and then nothing: people land on your site, leave within seconds and never get in touch.

Display campaigns are built for reach, and Google’s automation is very good at finding cheap clicks. If your campaign is set to maximise clicks, or optimised targeting is switched on, Google will look beyond the audience you chose and go wherever clicks cost least. The cheapest clicks are usually the ones in the list above. Prospecting campaigns are especially exposed. You’re reaching people who don’t know your brand yet, so there’s no past behaviour to anchor the targeting, and it drifts.

In Google Ads, open your Display campaign and go to the placements report. Sort by cost. For every placement with meaningful spend, ask:

• Is this a website or an app?
• Did it bring in any conversions?
• In Google Analytics, how engaged were visitors from this source? A very low engagement rate, or sessions lasting only a few seconds, is a warning sign.
• Does it look like a real publisher, or a random string of words?

Any placement spending money with poor engagement and no conversions is a candidate for exclusion. Add these to an account-level placement exclusion list so you can reuse it across all your campaigns.

This is the step most people skip, and it matters most. It’s where the last type of junk click from the list above gets caught.

Ask one simple question: would my ideal customer realistically be on this site? If you sell business insurance, a children’s colouring app isn’t your audience, however cheap the clicks are. If you sell premium skincare, a coupon site may bring you bargain hunters rather than buyers.

Then check the audience side of your campaign. Look at the demographics and audience reports. Are the age groups, locations and interests roughly what you’d expect? If optimised targeting has pulled you far from the audience you intended, consider tightening it or switching it off for prospecting.

All of this is worth doing now, because the campaign type itself is changing. Google is moving standalone Display campaigns into Demand Gen. Eligible advertisers have been able to move existing campaigns voluntarily with a migration tool since June 2026.

Later, new campaigns will only be created in Demand Gen, remaining campaigns will be migrated automatically, and the full switch is expected to finish by 2027. The Display inventory isn’t going away. It will sit inside Demand Gen alongside YouTube, Discover and Gmail.

For junk clicks, this matters in two ways. The good news is that Google’s own migration guide lists placement exclusions as supported in Demand Gen, so the clean-up you do now carries over. The catch is that some ad group-level exclusions aren’t supported and need removing before you migrate. This is another reason to keep your exclusions in the account-level list mentioned above, rather than inside individual ad groups.

Whether you’re still on Display or already on Demand Gen, the principle is the same. Don’t treat placement clean-up as a one-off job. Google keeps finding new placements, so a clean campaign this month can fill up with junk next month. Set aside time every week, even 20 minutes, to review where your ads showed and check those placements against the audience you actually want. That habit will save you more budget than any single setting.

Maybe you’ve checked your placements and still can’t work out where your budget is going. Or you’re not sure how the move to Demand Gen will affect your campaigns. Either way, our digital marketing team can help.

Get in touch with our team to talk it through.