Report and Stop Fraudulent Clicks and Form Submissions

[Kurt Steinbrueck]

Hi Everyone,

I've been running Google Ads campaigns for a while now and usually don't get too many fraudulent clicks/form submissions (that I'm aware of), but lately a couple of my clients have been getting a ton of spammy form submissions. I've implemented reCaptcha and that hasn't helped. I set up a honey pot field in the form to week out bots and set the thank you page up as a conversion while setting all form submissions as a secondary goal. That's helped some for tracking conversions, but Google Ads hasn't seemed to have "learned" how to get the real conversions. So, they are still getting a bunch of fake form submissions which come from Google Ads, which means a bunch of fraudulent clicks.

1. Is it possible to report fraudulent clicks? If so, can you point me to info for the process and give any tips?

2. What do you recommend to stop the fraudulent clicks in the first place?

Thanks.
Kurt

 

[Chris Barnard]

Hey Kurt, if you can get IPs from server logs you can block that way, and contact support to request an invalid traffic investigation.
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/11182074?hl=en#Reporting_invalid_traffic

https://www.google.com/ads/adtrafficquality/advertisers/ (there are more recommendations here too)

For 3rd party stuff, here is a related thread (ClickCease and Lunio): https://localsearchforum.com/threads/clickcease-alternatives.62281/

 

[fisicx]

Hey Kurt, if you can get IPs from server logs you can block that way

I've set up my contact form to collect the IP address of the sender. Makes it a lot simpler to block the spammers. If the contact form is for local services you can block every country except your own. Adding a 'this service is not available in your country' message is fairly simple. And if they are using a VPN block 'em all.