How to Stop Spam Leads from Performance Max Campaigns (Lead Gen)

If you are running Performance Max campaigns for lead generation, so not E commerce, you're going for form fills or phone calls. You have probably found you're getting lots of low quality spam for those form fills. That is probably how you found this video. We worked with a roofing company that was getting a lot of spam leads through their Performance Max campaign. I'm going to show you the exact trick that we did. It's very simple and it has completely eliminated all spam leads that they were getting and they now get high quality leads. One trick I'm going to show you. Let's dive in. Okay, so number one, if you're running Performance max for lead generation, do not use the same landing page that you use for your standard search campaigns or other display campaigns. YouTube, whatever. You want a dedicated page for your Performance Max campaign. It can be the exact same page. You just want it to be a different URL. Why you want full quality control. You want to know the traffic that's hitting that page is absolutely performance max traffic. And at the end of this video I'm going to show you a setting in your Performance Max campaign. You absolutely need that setting fixed. Otherwise traffic will go beyond just your landing page. So stay tuned. Towards the end of the video I'm going to show you that. So this page that I have pulled up on my screen, this is their exact landing page that you would find on our search campaign efforts too. However, and most of this URL is going to be blurred out because I just, I don't want to send a bunch of YouTube traffic to it which would skew data. So this piece here, pmax. I'm going, I'm going to leave up. But the reason I just want to show you like this is a dedicated page just for this Performance Max campaign. Again, same page exists in our search campaigns, just going to be a different URL. Now when you're on this page, what we're going for here is phone calls obviously and form fills. If you hit this form fill piece, you're going to test@test.com I'm just going to go through this real quick and then I'm just going to make up some stuff here. Then it's going to ask for name. So we'll do my name and then I'm going to make up a. Now I'm not going to completely fill this out. I, I really don't want to send them spam. If you hit request brochure and pricing, this will now take you to a success page saying giving you the next step, information. And thanking you for, you know, your inquiry. Okay, this is what you and I see. All right, here's how we combated spam. There's actually a hidden field, so, so bot traffic will see that hidden field. You and I only see first name, last name, phone number. I'm going to show you. So we use instapage for our landing page builder. Most landing page builders are going to have the capabilities of doing this. If you ask me, hey, how, how do I do it? I don't know because it's going to depend on your landing page builder. But take this advice. Apply it. Ask your designer, your developer, your landing page builder, software support. I don't know. But you'll be able to do it most if not, then fire them and go use another landing page builder. Here is the page builder again. We used Insta Page to build this exact page that you're seeing on my screen. But this form field here, if I go into edit the form, this is. There's step one, email, suburb, postcode. You guys all saw me fill that out. Then there's step two, first name, last name, phone number. However, check this out. I'm gonna hit show hidden, boom. There's this. Describe your project, right? So first name is required. Last name is required. Phone number is required. Describe your project. Not required. And it's hidden. So again, first name, last name, phone number. First name, last name, phone number. I don't see the hidden field, which is now describe your project. You know who does see the hidden field? Bot traffic. And you'll know like if, if you were getting spam traffic, you're, you're going to know their spam leads. A lot of the emails are like these like crazy mumbo jumbo, like numbers and letters. So this basically erases that. So how does it erase it? If a bot fills this field out, which it will, because again, a bot is a bot. So it's going to crawl the page, not look at it like a human being. It will then input data here and go through the process. Now, when this field gets filled out, guess what we don't do? We do not fire it as a conversion. So before anyone bot traffic or humans could come in, fill these forms out, hit boom, request brochure and pricing go to a success. Thank you page that fired a conversion to Google Ads. So Google thought, hey, let's just get more converting traffic that looks like this, right? And it's going to be a mixture of humans and unfortunately a bunch of the spam. Now what we've been able to do though is capture the spam with a honey pot. If you come in and it's honey potted, this field gets filled out by the bot traffic, then we do not fire a conversion in the way we set up the conversion tracking piece there. So basically it's just an event. Like hey, if this field is filled out, this is not a conversion. If these three fields are filled out and this is empty conversion, then we started submitting that conversion data back into Google Ads. So we're now reporting back to Google. Real human conversions only filtered the spam out and did not include them as conversions. Guess what the machine learning through the smart bidding is now learning on only human conversions. Guess what happened to traffic from Performance Max campaign Quality went up, spam leads went down and now we get absolutely zero spam that comes from our Performance Max lead generation cam campaign for this company. I'm going to show you though the setting that you must have on in your Performance Max campaign. To make sure all of this works correctly. Let's dive into the account. Okay, so I'm inside of the account or at least looking at this campaign. A lot of this will be blurred out, but you'll get what you need from this. So I'm going to campaign settings for this Performance Max campaign. Again, I only want traffic to go to that landing page. Performance Max though, if you go to additional settings, right, and you go to this piece called asset optimization here, there's a place called text and video. Video will just enhance your videos. This is on. This is fine for this purpose. However, text, you do not want this on when you're trying to run the strategy that I'm showing you. Why? Because if this is on, look at this piece here. Final URL Send traffic to the most relevant URLs on your site when it's likely to result in better performance. Basically, if this gets turned on, you're giving Google full control of where they send traffic based off of their signals. So they'll bypass your landing page. The that PMAX specific landing page that I have that honeypot form field set up in. If this setting was turned on, I would get some traffic to it. But not all Google would determine, hey, we'll send them to these pages on their websites. So, so you have to have this setting turned off and make sure 100% of the traffic then from that Performance Max campaign is going to that specific Performance Max honeypot landing page in order for this to work correctly. There you go. You now know how to eliminate spam from your performance max lead generation campaigns. I hope you got great value from this. I hope I was able to help you stop spam coming in and you're going to just get nice high quality leads somewhere on this page. There's going to be other videos that we have. I do recommend you go check out some of the videos if you're new to our channel. Lots and lots of great content, lots of free stuff, practical advice packed with lots of value. I hope. If not, no worries, I'll see you on the next video.