Good morning Owner,
The Trades Titan exists for one reason. To help home service business owners scale through marketing without the confusion and build a legacy worth having.
Every week that means one real finding from inside real contractor accounts. No fluff. No theory. Just what is actually happening right now and exactly what to do about it.
Last week I showed you how to pull the four reports that expose exactly how much Google has been wasting on bots and mobile games. If you missed it:
This week: how to actually file the claim and get your money back.
You've got your evidence. You know the number.
Now comes the part most people never reach.
Google has a form specifically for invalid click investigations. It's not linked anywhere obvious. Most business owners never know it exists.
Here it is:
Before you fill out a single field, three rules.
Only account admins can submit. Not managers. Not MCC accounts. Log in as an admin on the specific account you're filing for.
Use your 10-digit Customer ID. Top right corner of your Google Ads dashboard. Not your agency ID.
Only go back 60 days. Google won't investigate anything older. That window is already running.
THE FOUR FIELDS THAT DECIDE YOUR FATE
Most claims get auto-rejected before a human ever reads them. These field selections are why.
✅ Issue Type: Select “Traffic Quality: Invalid clicks and refunds”
Never select “Cost increase.” That gets filtered to a bot instantly.
✅ Concern related to: Check BOTH Display Network and Search Network
PMax failures bleed across both. Checking both forces a full audit.
✅ Did you increase your budget or bids recently? Select No
Say yes and Google blames your bidding instead of their system.
✅ Have you checked for invalid clicks? Select Yes
This signals you are an advanced user who knows the difference between standard filtered clicks and the systemic ones they missed.
THE MOST IMPORTANT FIELD ON THE FORM ⚠️
The Summary of Issue field is where your claim lives or dies.
Google's first-level support scans this field for keywords. Use the wrong language and a bot rejects it. Use the right language, and a human engineer reviews it.
The magic phrase: “systemic failure of automated click filters.”
You're not saying Google ripped you off. You're saying their Invalid Traffic detection system failed to catch a documented pattern. That's a technical argument. Technical arguments get escalated to humans.
Your evidence that makes it land:
🔴 Your CTR comparison. 64% at 3am vs 3 to 8% human benchmark. That gap is statistically impossible for real human behavior.
🔴 Zero-conversion spend. $453 to Search Partners. 96 clicks. Zero calls.
🔴 Off-hours bot activity. 35 time slots above 30% CTR between 11pm and 6am.
I put together the exact copy-paste Summary of Issue text, the full file naming system, and the escalation path if Google says no in this week's full article.
Read the full step-by-step guide here:
💡 TITAN INSIGHT
Filing without the right field selections is like showing up to court without a lawyer.
You might have the evidence. But if it gets routed to automated support before a human ever reads it, it doesn't matter.
The four field selections above are the difference between getting reviewed and getting rejected.
Next week, I'm covering something that could quietly add thousands of dollars to your business without touching your ad spend.
Schema markup. Most home service companies have never heard of it. The ones who use it show up differently in search results and get more clicks for free. I'll break down exactly what it is, why it matters, and how to add it in under an hour.
That's it for this week.
One form. Four field selections. One phrase that gets you in front of a human.
If this helped, forward it to a contractor friend running Google Ads. The 60-day window is running on their account, too.
See you next week.
— Paul
P.S. Reply “FILED” if you submitted a claim this week. I want to know how many of you are getting money back.
P.P.S. Someone forward this to you? Subscribe free at thetradestitan.com