Your first week of click fraud protection: a checklist

Day 0–1: connect and measure

Create your ClicksArmor account, connect the Google Ads account you care about most, and paste the tracking template. Keep the landing page unchanged.

Confirm clicks are scoring before you customize anything. Defaults exist so you can learn the traffic first.

Invite one other teammate — a media buyer or analyst — so the first week is not a single-person black box.

Write down your baseline CPA or ROAS for the prior fourteen days. You will need that number on day seven.

Save the tracking template screenshot in the workspace. Future you will thank present you when someone asks what was installed.

Confirm timezone and currency match how finance reads Google Ads. Mixed clocks create fake CPA stories.

Day 2–4: watch, do not over-block

Open the risk watch view daily. Note patterns: ASNs, referrers, hours. Block only the obvious junk — data centers bouncing in under a second, clear farms, repeat scanners.

Write down gray cases. Those become your week-one review agenda, not impulsive exclusions.

Resist the urge to import a giant historical IP list on day two. Quota space and false positives both hurt more than they help this early.

If a spike hits, export samples first. Acting from a chart without session timelines creates messy reversals later.

Cap yourself at a small number of manual blocks per day unless the pattern is overwhelming. Restraint is a feature in week one.

Pair each block with a one-line note in the team channel. Future reviews need that context.

Day 5–7: tighten with evidence

Promote stable junk patterns to the exclusion list and export them into Google Ads. Share a short note with your team: what was excluded, what you are still watching, and what CPA did.

Schedule the same review for the following Monday. Protection is a rhythm, not a one-time setup.

Compare junk share and engagement among remaining paid sessions against your day-zero baseline.

Release any premature blocks that caught real converters. Speed of correction builds trust in the system.

Invite finance or a stakeholder to the day-seven readout even if it is ten minutes. Early visibility prevents surprise audits.

What done looks like on day seven

You have at least one Google Ads account connected, default rules on, a named risk watch view, and a written note of what you blocked versus what you are still watching.

If any of those four are missing, extend the first week rather than declaring the rollout finished.

You also have a recurring calendar event for the weekly review. Without it, day eight quietly becomes day eighty with no cadence.

Finance or a stakeholder has seen one short export. Visibility early prevents surprise audits later.

Take a screenshot of the risk watch view with defaults on. Onboarding artifacts help the next hire more than oral tradition.

Common first-week mistakes

Customizing every rule on day one before you understand your traffic mix.

Blocking whole geos because a rival sits there, and removing real customers in the same city.

Skipping documentation so nobody remembers why an IP was excluded when CPA moves.

Treating the free-plan pilot as “set and forget” instead of a structured learning week.

Changing Smart Bidding strategies in the same week you turn on protection. You will not know which lever moved CPA.

Week two and beyond

Keep the Monday review. Promote stable junk, release false positives, and note one lesson for the team channel.

After a full billing cycle, revisit defaults. What looked aggressive in week one may be too loose once you see how much junk your keywords attract.

Add a second account or campaign type only after the first account’s rhythm feels boring. Boring is the goal.

If you want help, start on the free plan and walk the first week with defaults on before you customize. Small, measured steps beat a big bang that blocks real buyers by mistake.

Add alerts for junk-share spikes once the baseline is stable. Alerts without a baseline just create noise.

Hand-off notes for the next owner

Write a half-page hand-off: which account is connected, where the template lives, which view is the risk watch, and which gray cases are still open.

Include the day-zero baseline CPA and the day-seven junk share. Successors should not reverse-engineer history from screenshots alone.

List the calendar event for the weekly review and who is invited. Cadence dies when it depends on memory.

Link the team channel thread where day-two through day-seven notes live. Oral onboarding does not scale.

If you are the next owner reading this, resist rewriting every rule on day one. Inherit the rhythm, then tighten with evidence.