Google’s Quality Score is an important metric to watch because a higher quality score means you can bid less to attain the same ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Google determines Quality Score by assessing a number of metrics including clickthrough rate (CTR). The CTR, of course, is equal to clicks divided by ad impressions, or number of times an ad is displayed on a search engine or other sites/products within the search engine's network.

Impression fraud - an increased number of impressions with no intent to click - can drain your budget by reducing your CTR. For example, your competitor might turn off their ads on Tuesdays, and then generate searches and impressions on your mutual keywords by hiring people to type in searches or running a sophisticated script. As a result, your keywords suffer a drop in rank and you then have to bid higher to maintain your ad position in the search engine results.

Fortunately this is not very common, and it can be fairly easy to detect. I recommend setting up a report filter to track when the CTR of a keyword or ad suddenly decreases while the number of impressions rises or stays the same. Investigate when the filter was triggered to determine whether it's the result of a poorly designed ad, or on that rare occasion, impression fraud. If it's clearly the latter, send your analytics report to the search engine and ask them to make it right.

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