If you’re in digital marketing, you’ve likely been exposed to influxes of botty and spam-ridden form fills that seem impossible to prevent. It’s a real thing, especially in B2B, where leads are a primary KPI.
While harmless in theory, these bots pose a real threat to businesses. A few examples of this include:
- Negative site experience: The spam activity is still seen on the backend as site visitors. If your site is receiving a lot of traffic, real or fraudulent, your website can become unresponsive. This can turn away actual visitors frustrated with slow loading times.
- Wasted resources: Sales and RevOps teams will sacrifice valuable resources chasing down and/or cleaning up data full of fake leads.
- Inaccurate analytics: Measurement and ROI analytics are vastly skewed by high volume / low-cost leads that are not real and can inaccurately inform where marketing investments are made
Although no solution is fail-safe, here are 10 ways in which you can start to reduce risk of spam leads:
- Reduce investment in Performance Max campaigns for lead generation in Google unless you upload qualified leads as offline conversions. This helps Google’s AI learn the type of leads you consider qualified and will refine campaigns towards those types of users.
- Speaking of… Use OCT in Google (offline conversion tracking) to help the algorithm optimize towards quality leads, not just any lead. This method involved uploading and sharing “training data” aka your CRM / sales data. It’s a bit more work, but very worth it.
- Remove search partners and GDN from the environment in which your ads display and they have a very high right of spam form fills. You can also apply placement exclusion lists. If you’re using the {network} value track parameter in your tracking template, you should be able to confirm this quickly. It will help you see how many spam leads came from partners vs Google.
- Set up ReCAPTCHA. Visitors either receive a simple box to check or a more involved puzzle that requires identifying a picture. This does sometimes create friction in the user experience, so it’s important to evaluate this before implementing.
- Double opt-in. By requiring users to confirm their data twice, the likelihood of fraud lessens, though adding an extra verification step in the process can reduce conversion rates.
- Add a honeypot field. A honeypot field is an anti-spam technique that baits bots into filling out hidden form fields and then rejects their form submissions. Human users cannot see the field, so they don’t fill it out.
- Add qualifying questions to forms. The key is to ONLY fire a conversion when a user meets your qualifying criteria. So over time, Google learns what a “good” lead looks like and optimizes towards it.
- Limit the rate of form submissions to single IP addresses. This method can prevent bots from submitting forms in high volume.
- Monitor IPs and geos that are known culprits of fraud traffic. Using this method, bots can be blocked from the traffic coming from data centers or hosting providers.
- Implement a fraud and bot detection tool. A few such companies that offer these types of solution are CHEQ, ClickCease, and Anura. Pricing varies for each software, and the platforms they support expand beyond just Paid Search / Google.
Again, no solution will stop botty traffic and form fills from happening. Hopefully though, you and your marketing teams can minimize risk by implementing some of the solutions mentioned above.
