[superyesh]

Click fraud is very real, but the big players ploughing money into digital ad spend are not idiots. There is a huge shift towards conversion/action driven advertising. Advertisers can see how much of an effect a particular ad channel had on the final conversion e.g purchase of a shoe/add to cart. Just talking about click/ad fraud without talking about counter measures/best practices is just click-baity usually.

[s1artibartfast]

Dumb question. Where do fake clicks come from and how are they different from nonconverting clicks

[superyesh]

No not a dumb question at all. Hard to give an exhaustive list. One example is say you are a Facebook/Insta influencer who is promoting a link to a product. You might have an incentive to inflate the engagement rate with that link. Just engagement will be likes/clicks on the post/link. By tracking conversions you can try to mitigate this type of behavior to an extent.