Detecting click fraud with only 1px

September 15, 2025 · 2 min read

Click fraud is a systematic abuse of advertising budgets by click farms, competitors, and bots. The amount of click fraud in some industries can reach up to 50%, making it responsible for heavy expenses for advertisers with zero return on investment.

The pattern of click fraud typically follows predictable behaviors: multiple visits to ads from a single IP address (usually from data centers), or traffic originating from different mobile devices using residential proxies, particularly through mobile operators that result in zero conversions.

To detect click fraud, we use the tirreno security analytics, which we set up on websites to collect user information from two sources: first, the webpage itself, and second, a transparent 1px image that sends a second request to tirreno. This dual approach is effective because in most cases, click farms do not fully render pages and their resources. Therefore, if the loading of the 1px image is missing, it's most likely fraudulent traffic.

Finally, it's possible to establish risk rules based on the individual patterns that match your specific click fraud cases. This results in an automatically generated blacklist of fraudulent IP addresses that can be used in the future to integrate with your advertising networks and prevent further click fraud.

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