What is Waste Analysis?
Waste Analysis shows you exactly what’s driving invalid traffic across your campaigns. Instead of just seeing a single invalid traffic percentage, Waste Analysis breaks that number down into the underlying reasons clicks were classified as invalid so you can understand what is happening, not just how much invalid traffic there is.
This is live in your dashboard now, and no action is needed to start using it.
What does it show?
For your selected date range, Waste Analysis displays every waste type detected in your workspace and platform with:
Click Count - the count of the waste type.
Percentage - the share of invalid clicks flagged with that waste type. Since clicks can be flagged with more than one waste type, percentages can add up to more than 100%. E.g. a click might show both High Click Velocity and Robotic Click Patterns, so these types overlap rather than being mutually exclusive slices of a whole.
Each row can be expanded to reveal the top three campaigns most affected by that waste type. This lets you move from a high-level view (“18% of our waste is Rapid Clicking”) straight down to the specific campaigns driving it.
Waste analysis data is available from 1st July 2026 onwards.
How to use it
Open Waste Analysis from the left-hand navigation.
Scan the waste type table to see which categories make up the largest share of your invalid traffic.
Expand a row to see the top three campaigns affected by that specific waste type.
Filter the view by:
Waste type
Campaign name
Campaign type
Date range
Use these filters together to answer specific questions. For example, filtering by campaign type lets you check whether Search or Display is disproportionately affected by a particular waste type, while filtering by campaign name lets you audit a campaign across every waste type at once.
What this means for you
Waste Analysis turns invalid traffic from a single number into something you can act on:
Spot patterns, not just totals - if most of your waste falls under Rapid Clicking or Robotic Click Pattern, that points to automated bot activity. If it’s mostly Geo Mismatch or Unusual Connection Type, it may point to traffic sources outside your intended audience.
Prioritise where to look first - the campaigns surfaced under each waste type show you exactly where to focus. Rather than reviewing every campaign, you can jump straight to the ones driving the most waste of a given kind.
Have more informed conversations - whether you’re reporting up internally or discussing performance with a client, you can point to specific, named categories of waste rather than an unexplained percentage.
Waste types
Below is the full list of waste types you may see in the breakdown.
Waste type | What it means |
High Click Volume | One source is clicking your ads far more than a normal user would. |
High Distributed Click Volume | The same source is clicking across many different advertisers at once, suggesting an automated attack. |
High Search Click Volume | An unusually high number of clicks on your Search ads are coming from the same source. |
High Display Click Volume | An unusually high number of clicks on your Display ads are coming from the same source. |
High PMAX Click Volume | An unusually high number of clicks on your Performance Max ads are coming from the same source. |
Google Tooling Abuse | The clicks exploit Google services to click on ads. |
High Click Velocity | Clicks are arriving too quickly, one after another, for a real person to be behind them. |
Robotic Click Pattern | The timing between each click is too consistent, indicating automated behaviour like bots. |
Irregular Click Pattern | The clicking behaviour looks very different from what's normal for your account. |
Mobile Device Spoofing | A high number of clicks report as being a mobile user agent, but the pattern suggests the device type is being faked. |
Abnormal Operating System | An unusually high share of clicks are coming from Linux devices, which is rare for genuine consumer traffic. |
Abnormal Browser | The user agent on these clicks has an unusual structure that doesn't match standard browsers. |
No Search Activity | Clicks are not associated with any search keywords, indicating it might be direct or scripted traffic rather than genuine search activity. |
Proxy Traffic | Clicks were routed through one or more hidden proxy servers to disguise where they really came from. |
Click Origin Concentration | Click source signature has an abnormally high click density. |
IP Rotation | A large batch of clicks is coming from a network that keeps switching between different IP addresses. |
AI Agent Traffic | These clicks came from a known AI tool or crawler (e.g. ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity) rather than a real traffic source. |
Geolocation Mismatch | These clicks come from a location that doesn't match where your traffic normally come from. |
Low Quality Traffic | These clicks have little to no history of converting, so they're unlikely to be worth much commercially. |
Have a question that isn’t covered here? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager.