How to Limit & Prevent Spam Leads From Google Ads Traffic

A client came to me with a problem: I’m spending thousands of dollars on Google ads every month but all the leads I get are spam! 

Over 90% of the 40-something form submissions he got in a month were clearly junk. Not only was he wasting money on poor traffic but he was wasting his time weeding through these fake lead forms and calling phone numbers that didn’t ring. 

So what did I do about it? 

1. Stopped serving on the display network. When you’re getting a substantial amount of leads from display, it’s very likely spam. This network just doesn’t tend to drive action from quality leads. If anything, it should be thought of as more of a brand awareness strategy that drives action later.

2. Paused low quality keywords that were bringing traffic for services he didn’t sell. Reviewing search terms, I noticed a lot of traffic coming from searches that were irrelevant to his business. By blocking those searches or pausing the keywords driving them, I was able to save budget for the better quality searches. 

3. Stopped serving ads between 12 am and 6 am. Since this is a B2B business, it makes more sense to serve ads during business hours as much as possible. And given the limited budget, it was even more important to serve at optimal times of the day. When I noticed that we were actually driving a decent percentage of our leads between 12 am and 4 am, it even further confirmed that that was part of the problem. I’m not saying people can’t be looking for these services in the middle of the night, but the volume coming in was highly suspicious. 

4. Implemented Clickcease. This is a program that, for a small yearly fee, will block bot traffic from being able to access your site or see your ads.  

What happened? 

Immediately, the spam submissions slowed down to just a few per month. As Google stopped driving spam leads and optimizing itself for more, it began learning to optimize for the better leads.

We went from driving only 4 quality leads the month before I started (with a CPA of over $500) to 18 leads 2 months later (at a $225 CPA). My client is now saving money on advertising and getting more business from his leads than before.

It’s extremely important to know your audience and meet them where they are. This is a classic example of how we should not be trusting Google to automate all our campaigns. We still need expert campaign managers to see past the glowing results (look, 40 leads!) and expose them for what they really are (look, your ad served to a bot at 2 am and it filled out a form).

If this sounds familiar, let’s chat about how I can help you get more for your Google Ads budget. There's a better way than continuing to pay for a bunch of bot traffic and fake leads!