A bot that clicks a product ad costs you the click. A bot that clicks, loads the product page, adds the item to the cart and then leaves costs you the click plus the next three weeks of campaign decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That second bot is what makes e-commerce ad fraud its own category. In most invalid traffic the fake stops at the click, so the funnel below it does the detection work: no session, no event, no order. In retail the fake keeps walking, because what gets imitated is not an impression but shopping behavior, and shopping behavior is a set of ordinary web events the store publishes itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In practice, teams looking at this for the first time go hunting for the missing half of the funnel and find it fully populated. Add-to-cart rates hold up, product pages look busy, and nothing reads as broken until margin or repeat-purchase rate slides.<\/p>\n\n\n