How Protect Ads works

Protect Ads Now Protects Your Microsoft Advertising (Bing Ads) Campaigns From Click Fraud

Protect Ads extends its real-time click fraud detection and IP blocking to Microsoft Advertising (Bing Ads). Learn how our new Bing integration detects bots, blocks fraudulent IPs at the campaign level, and keeps your Microsoft Advertising budget focused on real customers.

Click fraud is not a Google-only problem. Advertisers running campaigns on Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) face the same threats — bots, click farms, competitor clicks, and automated scripts — that drain Google Ads budgets every day. Until now, most click fraud protection tools focused exclusively on Google. With Protect Ads' new Bing integration, your Microsoft Advertising campaigns get the same powerful, real-time protection that thousands of advertisers already rely on for Google Ads.

Why Microsoft Advertising needs click fraud protection

Microsoft Advertising powers ads across Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and the Microsoft Audience Network — reaching hundreds of millions of users worldwide. As the platform grows, so does its attractiveness to fraudsters:

  • Bots and automated scripts target Bing search ads just as aggressively as Google. Many bot networks are platform-agnostic — they click any PPC ad they encounter, regardless of the search engine.
  • Competitor clicks are common in high-CPC verticals. A rival can exhaust your daily Microsoft Advertising budget just as easily as on Google, pushing you out of auctions during peak hours.
  • Click farms generate fraudulent traffic across all major ad platforms. If you are running campaigns on both Google and Bing, unprotected Bing spend is a gap in your defense.

Without dedicated fraud protection on Microsoft Advertising, you are leaving budget on the table — paying for clicks that will never convert and polluting the data you use to optimize campaigns.

How Protect Ads detects click fraud on Bing

Protect Ads uses the same multi-layered detection engine for Bing that powers its industry-leading Google Ads protection. Every click on your Microsoft Advertising campaigns is evaluated in real time against dozens of behavioral, technical, and reputational signals:

  • Behavioral analysis: Mouse movement, scroll depth, session duration, and page interaction patterns are examined. Bots produce telltale signatures — uniform timing, zero engagement, impossibly fast navigation — that differ sharply from genuine visitors.
  • IP reputation and threat intelligence: Each visitor's IP is checked against continuously updated databases of known proxies, VPNs used for fraud, data-center ranges, Tor exit nodes, and previously flagged addresses.
  • Device fingerprinting: Browser attributes, screen resolution, installed plugins, and rendering behavior are combined into a fingerprint. Inconsistencies — such as a headless browser masquerading as a standard Chrome session — flag automated traffic immediately.
  • Frequency and velocity rules: Unusual click frequency from the same IP, device, or region within a short time window triggers automatic blocking, catching both brute-force floods and sophisticated low-and-slow attacks.
  • Microsoft Click ID (msclkid) tracking: Protect Ads identifies Bing traffic through the msclkid parameter, ensuring accurate attribution and detection specifically for your Microsoft Advertising campaigns.

How Bing IP blocking works

When Protect Ads confirms a fraudulent click, the offending IP is blocked instantly and added to your Microsoft Advertising campaigns as a negative site exclusion via the official Microsoft Advertising API:

  1. Real-time detection: A click arrives on your landing page through a Bing ad. The Protect Ads tracking code evaluates the visit in milliseconds.
  2. Asynchronous blocking: If the visitor matches known bot signatures or triggers behavioral red flags, the IP is queued for blocking. The entire process runs asynchronously so your page performance is never affected.
  3. Campaign-level enforcement: The blocked IP is pushed to all your active Bing campaigns with blacklist protection enabled, using Microsoft's Campaign Management API. This tells Microsoft Advertising to stop serving your ads to that address.
  4. Smart exclusion management: Microsoft Advertising allows up to 100 IP exclusions per campaign. Protect Ads includes a built-in exclusion list optimizer that automatically manages this limit — when the cap is reached, lower-priority entries (based on fraud score and recency) are rotated out to make room for new, higher-threat blocks.

The result: confirmed fraudulent IPs are blocked at the platform level, not just on your website, ensuring they cannot click your Bing ads again.

What you see in your dashboard

Your Protect Ads dashboard gives you full visibility into Bing protection alongside your Google Ads data:

  • Blocked IPs: Every blocked IP is logged with the detection signals that triggered the block — VPN, proxy, Tor, crawler, headless browser, user-agent anomaly, frequency violation, and more.
  • Country breakdown: See which geographic regions generate the most fraudulent Bing traffic, so you can refine targeting or apply stricter rules.
  • Campaign-level stats: Understand which Bing campaigns attract the most fraud and allocate protection resources accordingly.
  • Platform switching: Toggle between Google and Bing views in the fraud dashboard with a single click. All your protection data is unified in one place.

Who gets Bing protection

Bing Ads integration is available on the Professional and Enterprise plans. If you are already on one of these plans, you can enable Bing protection immediately:

  1. Navigate to Domain Settings in your Protect Ads dashboard.
  2. Connect your Microsoft Advertising account.
  3. Select the Bing campaigns you want to protect.
  4. Protection activates instantly — blocked IPs begin syncing to your campaigns right away.

If you are on the Starter plan, upgrade to Professional to unlock Bing protection alongside advanced features like account-level Performance Max protection and custom blocking rules.

Protecting both Google and Bing — the complete shield

Most advertisers run campaigns on both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. With Protect Ads, you now have a single platform that protects both:

  • Unified detection: The same fraud signals and detection algorithms cover both platforms. A bot that clicks your Google ad and then your Bing ad is caught by the same intelligence.
  • Cross-platform insights: Your dashboard shows fraud patterns across both networks, helping you understand the full threat landscape and make smarter budget decisions.
  • One tracking code: The same lightweight JavaScript snippet on your landing pages detects and attributes traffic from both Google (gclid) and Bing (msclkid) automatically. No extra installation needed.

Click fraud does not respect platform boundaries — and now, neither does your protection. Enable Bing integration today and ensure every dollar of your Microsoft Advertising budget reaches real, high-intent customers.