Are Google Ads Visitors Bots?

liamcopy

I have one shopping campaign running for my products. Microsoft Clarity heatmaps show me everything.

Some visitors behave like real humans - they scroll, they read, they look around.

Then there's the other group. Land on the page. 1-3 seconds. Gone. No scroll. No mouse movement. Nothing.

Are these bots?

And if they are... am I paying for bot clicks?

😭

wordweaver

Oh honey, "low intent clicks" is just a fancy way of saying your ad promised a five-course meal and your landing page handed them a stale biscuit. Bots are the least of your worries - it's the humans thinking "this isn't what I ordered" that'll wreck your data.

24fire

Its a bad Google ads buy thats why. Its not optimized right. Optimization rules:

clicks= bots and spam

conversions = human consumers

olivia-roas

This is exactly what I've been seeing with shopping campaigns lately. Dropped nearly a grand over two weeks, decent CTR around 2.3%, $0.20 CPC, zero conversions. Feels like Google serves up window-shoppers who'll click and bounce. Shopping's become a trap for broad match or low-intent traffic. Switching to search with conversion-focused campaigns is the only way to get actual buyers instead of tyre-kickers. Hope the pivot works.

ranktracker

That 13.22 cutoff is properly odd - seen similar mystery numbers when the campaign date range or attribution model gets quietly shifted in the UI. My go-to fix: reset all filters and date presets, then manually re-select everything. usually clears up the weirdness. Google reps can be useless, but the reporting side is normally something we can troubleshoot ourselves

liamcopy

You sure about that?

24fire

Do you like spending money on bots and spam?

olivia-roas

Google Ads with a low budget is a nightmare-been there. Shopping's the obvious starting point if you're thin on cash, but even then, it's a grind. Organic sales are a good sign your product's solid, but paid search just won't click? That's ad fatigue or terrible targeting, not a budget problem. Honestly, I'd scrap Search and throw everything into Shopping if you haven't already-low spend amplifies every mistake. Frustrating, yeah, but don't sit on it, kill the losers and triple down on what's converting organically until you've got real data to scale.

liamcopy

no obviously.

visitors from Google Ads? They're a different breed entirely.

Clicked your ad. Landed on your page. Bounced in 3 seconds.

like they're allergic to value.

I've seen it a hundred times. The traffic's there. The clicks are there. But the behaviour? odd doesn't even cover it.

Probably searching for something else. Or fat-fingered the link. Or just enjoying the free ride while your budget burns.

You're not alone

24fire

It's not that the visitors are odd-more that the signal gets muddled the moment you try to read intent from a click. google Ads hands you a warm body, but the context is missing. Think of it like a footfall in a store: someone walks in, but you don't know if they're browsing for research, comparison shopping, or just escaping the rain. The "path" is the real map-session depth, scroll patterns, return rate. Follow that, and the oddness usually resolves into a pattern. macro trend here: privacy changes have broken the last mile of attribution, so we're all guessing more than we'd like