Is AdWords corrupt?

Hi IH Community,

Last week I decided I need to move out of hacking together code into full on marketing mode for https://full.cx

I turned to Reddit Ads and Google AdWords. Embracing the mentality of only do what you can measure , I turned on Microsoft Clarity and HotJar (also a chance to measure both at the same time).

Reddit Ads was pretty poor click-through-rate, so pause the Ads on Reddit till I have more time to focus on why there was a poor performance.

The first campaign on AdWords was setup using the Google AI onboarding guide. I do not recommend using it.

Within a few hours I saw no traffic, and yet Google Ads was reporting 1000's of clicks. I checked all the settings for the ads, Google Analytics, HotJar, Clarity and server logs. The clicks reported in Google Ads were not translating. I stopped the campaign.

After analysing the previous campaign I created a new campaign only targeting search results.

As soon as the ads were approved, I had traffic, though the traffic was erratic, basically a lot of traffic coming from India, Pakistan, and Philippines from the Google Ads which clicked randomly all the site.

Within a few hours I configured the ads to target USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and UK, and exclude the countries with the strange traffic.

Still the traffic is coming from the excluded countries and the weird clicking continues.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Anyone got any tips for optimising Google Ads?