Over 70% of my clicks were bots - anyone else?

prpro

today has been brutal. i checked my traffic quality report and nearly three-quarters of the clicks were bots. Out of around 4,000 link clicks, about 2,850 were non-human. that leaves barely 1,000 real people.

this campaign normally delivers 120-140 orders with that volume and spend. Right now I'm under 30 orders, and the ad spend is already painful. The CTR looks gorgeous on paper - that's the crazy part.

It's been escalating: a few days ago it was 30% bots, then 50%, now over 70%. At this point I'm seriously considering turning the ads off. How are we supposed to scale like this?

dusting

the deeper question: how is this legal? It's like paying for seats no one sits in

nightowl

just pulled up Clarity - bot traffic has outweighed real visitors by about three to one over the last fortnight. Scale is pointless if it's not human

communityfirst

monday i saw something similar - 5k visits all pinging from Ashburn, VA. It's frustrating when those clicks look promising but don't convert. On the flip side, it's a good reminder to focus on quality over volume. We're building genuine audience connections, not just chasing numbers.

localpack

Same here. checked my data yesterday and saw 68% bot clicks on one campaign. Turned off all display and audience network placements - dropped to 12% overnight. Worth looking at your placement settings if you haven't already.

ranktracker

Yeah, I've been seeing the same pattern in my own data. What's been working for me is stripping back placements to just Facebook and Instagram feeds-no Audience Network, no Messenger, none of that. Also killing Android traffic completely. Dropped my bot click share by about sixty percent within a week. Worth testing if you can handle the reduced reach.

24fire

Bot traffic is brutal - feels like we're all paying a hidden tax for scale. One thing that's worked in my experience: turn off A+ audiences completely, and narrow placements to just the Instagram and Facebook feeds. Then duplicate your best-performing adset two more times and let it run for a few days. It won't fix everything, but it usually stabilises the noise. The platforms are running on autopilot with zero guardrails for quality.

communityfirst

you've absolutely nailed the pain here. We ran into this exact mess last month - same situation, Facebook was showing perfectly normal CTRs and CPCs on the surface, but something felt off. When we finally dug into the backend traffic quality, it was gutting to see how much bot noise had slipped through. What turned it around for us was tightening our audience targeting significantly, stripping out broad interest clusters that seemed to attract those networks, and moving away from automated placements entirely. we also started validating real traffic quality on the backend using a dedicated tool - because honestly, platform metrics can lie.

The bot problem has gotten worse across the board. Some days you're just absorbing garbage traffic and the only move is to pause, run a full audit of your layers, and come back with stricter parameters. 72% is brutal - I've seen teams report 80+ on campaigns that weren't dialled in. But here's the silver lining: if your creatives are strong and your conversion funnel holds up, the root cause almost always comes down to audience selection or placement settings letting the bad stuff through. It's a team-wide win when we catch it early and tighten those knobs together

ranktracker

Have you checked whether those "bot" reports are actually flagging low quality traffic correctly, or just labelling fast bounces as bots?

thing is, a lot of third-party traffic quality tools massively over-classify Meta traffic as bots - especially after the recent in-app browser changes and aggressive preloading behaviour from Meta. What typically happens is the platform fires link click sessions, prefetches pages, or creates ultra-short visits that analytics tools interpret as non-human, even though a decent chunk are real users. The big clue: your CTR still looks healthy but conversion efficiency tanked underneath. that points more toward traffic quality dilution or weak purchase intent expansion, not literal 72% fake bot traffic.

worked with a COD ecommerce account spending about $1.5k/day. One weekend they suddenly got nearly 11k clicks while Hyros and another tracking tool flagged roughly 68% as bots. CTR jumped from about 2.9% to over 5.4%, CPC looked fantastic, but purchases collapsed from around 118 daily orders down to just 27 - same spend. The founder thought Meta traffic had turned completely fake. digging deeper showed most sessions were ultra-low intent mobile in-app traffic with sub-3-second engagement, not automated bots. ATC rate had fallen from 9.2% to just over 2%, email opt-in rate dropped from 14% to under 5%, and Meta had aggressively expanded delivery into weaker audience pockets after conversion signal instability. After tightening placement control, reducing aggressive expansion, refreshing high-intent creatives, and feeding stronger downstream purchase signals back through CAPI, order volume recovered from 27 back above 90 daily purchases within about 10 days. "Bot flagged" traffic ratios normalised below 20%.

So - are your Add to Cart and checkout initiation rates also collapsing right now, or is it mainly final purchase conversion that got wrecked while upper funnel engagement still looks normal?

prpro

Three days ago, it was sitting around 30%. Yesterday? Over 50%. And today it's shot past 70%. Honestly, the thought of just killing the campaign entirely is tempting. Feels like throwing money into a void.

dusting

I've kept mine switched off for the better part of 80% of the time since late April. The instability in performance has become so erratic that it makes more sense financially to lean into organic sales until the platform sorts itself out - if that ever happens. Bot traffic inflating the numbers just adds another layer of noise to an already broken signal.