Pre-bid fraud filtering blocks 4x more bad clicks than post-click scrubbing

Pre-bid fraud filtering blocks 4x more bad clicks than post-click scrubbing

Pre-bid filter (block before paying) vs post-click analysis (refund after).

— Pre-bid block rate: 12-18% ▏▏▏▏▏▏▏▏▏
— Post-click flagged: 3-5% ▏▏▏ (recovered as refunds)
— Refund recovery success: only 34% of disputes
— Pre-bid adds 15-40ms per request

Read: post-click only recovers a third of what you already paid; pre-bid stops spend at the door but adds latency and can over-block thin-margin geos. Run both, weight pre-bid. n=11 buyers.