Fixing Google Ads Spam Leads

It may seem harsh to admit, but it’s true: Half your leads could be junk, and you may not even know it. If you’re running campaigns through Google Ads, there’s a good chance spam leads are silently draining your ad spend and skewing your performance metrics.

These fake or low-quality leads can come from bots, click farms or even competitors. They seriously impact your user experience (UX), conversion rates and, ultimately, your bottom line. This is especially relevant if you’re a small business that relies on quality traffic during a much-desired growth period.

In this article, we’ll introduce the concept of spam leads, explain where they come from and explore the costly effects they can have on your business. You’ll also learn how Google’s algorithm, search trends and SEO efforts can factor into the problem. Read on to discover the different types of spam leads and how to fix them effectively.

What Spam Leads Are (and Why You Should Care)

Spam leads are fake or low-intent form submissions that appear to be genuine prospects but, after closer analysis, offer no real value to your business. In digital marketing, they’re alarmingly common and often slip through unnoticed, polluting your customer relationship management (CRM) with junk data.

How common are they? Well, Akamai’s 2024 research found that 42.1% of overall traffic activity was from bots, with 65.3% of that bot traffic from malicious bots specifically. Even more worrisome, a total of 63.1% of the bad bot traffic used advanced techniques.

So, what are the main sources and leading culprits? You’re most likely to encounter spam or fake leads as a result of click farms, bots or even real people using misleading information. The latter is especially prevalent when your site forms are too open or poorly targeted. In some cases, spammy traffic is attracted by broad ad settings or weak filters, leading to an influx of unqualified contacts.

As you may suspect, the consequences for your business are serious. From wasted ad budget and distorted performance metrics to lost time when your sales team gets inundated with chasing dead ends, you risk making the cost of your Google Ads that much higher. Spam leads can also skew your understanding of what’s working, making it harder to optimize your campaigns.

Tools like honeypot fields can help block bots, but stopping spam entirely requires a focused strategy. This means that caring about spam leads is part of protecting your ad spend and focusing on real, qualified leads to boost genuine positive performance and sustainable growth.

The 6 Common Types of Spam Leads

Understanding where spam leads originate is crucial for enhancing your pay-per-click (PPC) lead quality and safeguarding your ad budget. Below are six of the most common types of spam leads that businesses often encounter through Google Search campaigns and other digital channels. This will help you distinguish between real traffic and action, and corrective measures to get your campaigns back on track.

1. Click Farm Traffic

Click farms use low-paid workers to manually click ads and fill forms, often creating unnatural spikes in traffic from unusual or irrelevant locations. You’ll notice rapid, repetitive form submissions and traffic from countries outside your target market. These leads rarely convert and skew your conversion tracking and metrics, making it difficult to evaluate campaign performance or refine your bidding strategy.

2. Bot Leads

Automated bots can quickly fill out lead forms using identical or random names and emails. They often originate from strange referral sources or unknown networks. You’ll typically find form submissions with no logical connection to your content, high submission rates at odd hours and zero meaningful engagement. These bots inflate lead volume without adding any real merit.

3. Competitor Sabotage

In some cases, competitors may intentionally click your ads or fill out forms to drain your ad spend. This form of click fraud results in fake leads and wasted budgets. Patterns of abuse can be spotted through IP address clustering, where multiple submissions come from similar or repeated IPs. These leads often appear legitimate but have no interest in your offerings and can disrupt your PPC metrics.

4. Incentivized Leads

These occur when users fill out forms purely to gain access to freebies, discounts or downloadable resources without a genuine interest in your product or service. Expect high bounce rates, low time on site and minimal follow-up engagement. While these are real people, they’re not qualified leads. Relying on these submissions can degrade the effectiveness of your bidding strategy and overinflate lead counts.

5. Purchased List Fills

Some low-quality vendors use pre-existing or bought contact databases to simulate engagement. These leads often stem from weird, non-transparent traffic sources and typically show a very low conversion-to-sale ratio. Because they’re not generated through organic interest or relevant searches, they don’t reflect real demand, making it hard to optimize campaigns using conversion tracking or adjust your Google Ads bidding accordingly.

6. Form Scraping Bots

These bots scan websites for form fields and submit them automatically, often without even visiting the rest of the site. You’ll see form submissions without corresponding session activity, no pageviews and little to no time spent on your site. Since they bypass the actual UX, these leads distort your metrics, inflate performance reports and can hurt your decision-making.

Note: Not all bots are bad. You do get “good bots,” too — those used by search engines or trusted tools to index or analyze your site. Examples include Bingbot, Googlebot and different monitoring tools. By identifying and filtering out bad bots like the spam lead types described above, you can better protect your ad spend, improve lead quality and redirect your team’s focus to only those contacts with real conversion potential.

How To Mitigate Spam Leads in Google Ads: 5 Strategies

You know us all too well by now; we prefer to walk the digital marketing talk, which is why we vouch for the following five mitigation strategies for eliminating or managing Google Ads spam leads effectively.

We put our money where our mouth is and consulted with Jhoslyn Garcia, Paid Search Specialist at Brafton. She shared valuable, tried and tested insights that confirm these next tips as significant for astute digital marketers and content advertisers far and wide.

Strategy No. 1: Use Campaign Targeting Controls via Setup

Begin with tight campaign settings to limit exposure to bad traffic. Use geo-targeting restrictions to focus only on relevant regions and exclude high-risk areas. Apply device and time-of-day filters to prevent traffic during off-hours when click fraud is more common. You can also fine-tune language and demographic targeting to better align with your ideal customer profile and limit irrelevant clicks.

Garcia’s hot tip: “Restrict campaigns to certain IP ranges, business hours or desktop devices to reduce leads from bots or low-quality mobile users.”

Strategy No. 2: Practice Form Fill Hygiene

Improve lead quality by making it harder for fake leads to get through. Block submissions from personal email domains such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com, particularly when targeting B2B leads. Implement a CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA to stop bots and use phone numbers or email addresses as verification to ensure the submissions come from real, engaged users.

Strategy No. 3: Prioritize Closed Landing Pages

Open forms are easy targets for bots. Instead, use closed landing pages that require user interaction before showing the form. Redirect suspicious users or high-risk traffic to alternate pages and limit the number of form fields to discourage fake entries while still qualifying the lead. This adds a layer of friction that deters low-intent users.

Strategy No. 4: Include Audience and Traffic Exclusions

Proactively block problematic sources. Exclude known bot IP addresses and use search term reports to add negative keywords that filter out irrelevant or spammy queries. On the Display Network, exclude poor-quality or untrusted placements. You can also prevent invalid click categories from triggering your ads through campaign-level exclusions. Garcia suggests “using negative keywords like ‘ jobs’, ‘free’ and ‘employment’ to prevent your ads from showing to unqualified users.”

Strategy No. 5: Adopt and Experiment With Platform-Specific Tweaks

Each Google Ads channel offers tools to help combat spam. In Performance Max (PMax) campaigns, use audience signals to guide the algorithm toward higher-quality traffic. For Search campaigns, tighten your keyword match types to avoid overly broad queries. Stick to trusted placements on the Display Network and avoid broad automatic targeting until performance has been vetted.

Additional tips and strategies include checking your location settings, creating different assets and assessing audience matches. Garcia adds that you can “integrate CRM or sales feedback into ad platforms (via offline conversion imports) so Google can optimize for quality, not just volume.” As she rightly notes, “more leads don’t always mean better results”. An intentional and well-monitored ad setup should always be on your radar.

Prevent Bots From Exhausting Your Budget

If you’re not actively blocking fake leads, your brand could be sponsoring a click farm. Spam leads from bots and fake clicks can quietly drain your budget and waste your team’s precious time. To protect your campaigns, it’s critical to build preventative tactics into your ad setup and lead capture process.

Adapt our recommended strategies to help you reduce fake or low-quality form submissions. These tools (and many tips on the Brafton blog) will help you optimize your Google Ad campaigns, improve lead generation and enhance digital marketing outcomes.

Strengthen your CRM with high-quality leads and ensure your search campaigns are designed to attract real prospects. Not to mention, encouraging you to keep a close eye on (read: regularly audit) campaigns to protect your ROI.

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