By John Eberhard
Have you ever gotten leads like this from Google Ads?
Name: dgdgfdgdgf
Email: dfgdgdgfdgdgas
Phone: fgjghjgfjfjj
If you have, you’re not alone. But this puzzling and frustrating phenomenon can be isolated and prevented.
First of all, Google Display ads are most susceptible to this problem. Google Display ads are where the advertiser runs ads that contain an image, and the ads are then displayed on various websites (not on Google itself) that allow Google to run ads on their sites.
So I just discovered why Google Display ads are more susceptible to generating bogus leads. Basically, a site owner will create a bot, that will click on your ad on their site, go to your landing page, and then fill out your form with bogus information.
The reason they do this is that Google will then register that a conversion (someone filling out your form) has occurred. And then Google will send more traffic to that site, since it supposedly was a good source of conversions. And the more clicks that are made (by the bot) on that site, the more money the site owner will make through the program called Google AdSense.
So the problem, at least with Google Display, is a greedy site owner who wants to make a little bit more money at your expense.
With Google Search, where people type in keywords on Google itself, you can still get some bogus leads.
- Google’s search partners, like ask.com or Lycos have weaker bot protections than Google.com. Bots crawl these sites, trigger your ad, and fill out the form to “blend in” with human traffic so Google’s fraud detection doesn’t flag them. The simple fix is go to Campaign Settings > Networks and uncheck “Include Google search partners.”
- Competitors (or hired “click farms”) search for your top keywords and manually fill out forms with gibberish or fake contact info. The goal is to drain your daily budget so your ads stop showing, leaving the “real” leads for them. Monitor the “Invalid Clicks” column in Google Ads. If you see patterns from specific locations or IP ranges that don’t match your service area, use IP Exclusions to block them.
- Bots crawl the web to “warm up” their browser cookies. By clicking a high-intent search ad and completing a conversion, they look like a “high-value human” to Google and other ad platforms. This prevents them from being blocked when they perform their actual task (like scraping data or price-matching). Implement a honeypot field (a hidden form field that humans can’t see but bots will fill out) or a “Qualification Question” that requires a non-generic answer.
Prevention
No advertiser wants to be paying for clicks that lead to bogus leads. So there are two steps you can take to prevent this.
- Using a fraud prevention service like Clickcease. These services identify suspicious clicks coming from bots, and blocks them after they are identified.
- Track conversions separately from all your campaigns, i.e. make the incoming email subject line unique for each campaign. That way you can figure out which campaigns are the biggest contributor to the fake lead problem. Then you can decide what to do about it. Let’s say you find that all your bogus leads are coming from a Google Display campaign, you can decide to cut down the daily budget for that campaign or even pause the campaign completely. That’s if a fraud prevention service doesn’t handle the problem completely.
- Use the other fixes mentioned above.
If you’d like a free consultation on Google Ads, contact Real Web Marketing at 661-441-2429 or fill out a form here.
