← The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
How to Stop Spam and Bot Traffic & Leads (Episode 478)
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Foreign hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about bot spam, junk traffic from Google Ads, how you can stop it. And I'm going to go through multiple settings that can be critical in bringing spot and spam traffic directly to your website from Google Ads. I see it all the time. It is absolutely a critical issue that can cripple a campaign and waste thousands of dollars very quickly and go through specific instances of what you can do to stop it. And that's it. That, that is the whole show today. I'm going to dedicate the entire show to this because it's a critical issue that I find people have a lot. So I'm going to start with a list. Towards the end of the show, I'm going to give you an example of a campaign, of how a campaign could be set up to explain, you know, an example of what it might look like and test this example against what you have. Does this sound familiar to you? Do you possibly fall into some of these settings, these traps that could cause problems in your Google Ads account? We'll go through that and at the very end I'll have a critical example, critical example to tell you about why you fall into this trap, why so many people fall into this trap, and how you can just avoid even falling into it. All right, so we're going to jump right into it right after I tell you about optio.com so opteo.com PSP is a special URL that you can go to to try the Internet's best Google Ads management software, period. I talk about this software all the time. It is a very popular software, growing and growing with the number of people that are realizing just how much it can do for them to save them time in their Google Ads accounts. This is a tool that not only helps you to optimize things like your budget, but it also does things like figuring out suspicious behavior that might be happening in your account. And that's what we're talking about today is, is why all of a sudden are we getting incredibly high click through rates, incredibly high conversion rates? Is this something that we should celebrate or is this suspicious and maybe your red flags aren't being raised, maybe you don't see it, but Optio is a system that can show you where this is. It is integrated into your Google Ads and you at the push of a button can review critical points of data in your account that you otherwise might miss. Along with that, it does reporting so that you can get reports sent to you as often as you need and as deep as you need them to be. Wonderful system. You can try it for free@optio.com PSP this is a special URL that you can go to to get 28 days for free. Otherwise you only get two weeks. But you get 28 days for free. You get double the time if you use my special URL. That's o.com PSP to try it. I guarantee you're gonna like it. Okay, so no questions this episode but you can still send in a question Chris well, it's paid search podcast is where you can send your question in. My name is Chris Schaefer and if you haven't met me, I'm a 20 year plus veteran of Google Ads management and doing this for a very long time. I am approaching my 500th episode of this podcast. Unfortunately the first 100 were lost due to some decisions made a while back, so those are not recoverable. So you'll only be able to watch the first 378 episodes of this. But I have been doing this for almost 500 episodes now, so there is a wealth of knowledge and I try and deliver that every single week. So if you aren't subscribed, whether you're watching on YouTube, listening on your favorite podcast app on I deliver this message every Monday and I do it almost every every Monday of the year. I take off very little time actually. So you constantly can get new information, tips and advice about your Google Ads accounts. All right, so let's jump into today's episode how to Stop Spam Bot Traffic and Leads. So this is let's very quickly define I don't think anybody needs it defined, but spam bot traffic is something that is not going to affect you at all. It's not even going to come up on your radar until it affects your lead flow in two ways. 1. Spam and bot traffic can so overwhelm your Google Ads account that you are not even able to afford the traffic that isn't spam and bot. Because it takes up 99% of your your spend, it can absolutely overwhelm an account. I've seen it many times and I'll explain what it looks like here momentarily. The other way that you can realize that it's causing some kind of problem, and this is where most people really get upset is when it starts filling their lead funnels. Whenever you're getting leads, sales, phone calls that are unqualified. This can happen from people that are getting phone calls that you know there's no one on the phone or an immediate call and hang up. Or, you know, in the case of spam traffic, people that are not in your area, don't speak your language, aren't looking for what you're selling. It's just unqualified spam leads, junk leads. And seems like the most offensive is bot, you know, because this is a, this would be a malicious type of traffic that is robotic, designed by someone, and it's a program that actually goes and clicks on your ads and clicks on your lead forms and in some cases fills out your lead forms, dials a phone number. It is incredibly expensive if you don't catch it. So that's what it is. Now let's get into how to stop it. So I'm going to go with the first. There's eight total that I'm going to go through. The first three or four are probably my favorite ways to stop it and the most egregious methods that I find that they happen. So first of all, first stop on the spam traffic and leads train is search partners. It has to be search partners. And search partners is a setting for a search campaign that you can turn off. You do not have to run traffic on search partners. You can run it exclusively on google.com you are not forced to run on search partners if you don't know if you're running traffic on search partners. There is a segment button. So segment, you can segment your traffic at the campaign level to see how much of your spend is going to search partners. If you are unfamiliar with it, go to the segment button, click the network with search partners segmentation, and it will split the traffic and show you Google search partners and display. So the most egregious situations I see is where 90% or maybe 100% of the spend is going to search partners and the advertiser is not spending a single dime on google.com everything's going to search partners. This is not a situation you want to be in. And let me explain how deceptive this traffic is. You can actually go into your search terms for a search campaign and segment your search terms by search partners. So if you're getting 50% of your traffic, 30% of your traffic from search partners, you can go into your search terms, filter your search terms, or I should say segment your search terms by network and it'll show you which clicks, you know, which search terms were google.com and which ones were search term search partners. And after seeing this over and over again, I will tell you search terms from the search partners. Are very suspicious. They are almost inhumanly perfect in the way that they are conducted. So you might have a keyword that is really, you know, really specific. Like I think something I was recently working on was construction job site, personal injury lawyer. Okay, really, really specific. It's not really designed to get that exact search. It's just designed to get searches that are kind of like that, you know, I put it as a phrase match. Yet if I were to run that on search partners, what I would get was that exact search. I would get something that was, you know, like wait, someone actually searched that? Someone actually searched that really random, weird search. You, you know, it's not human, it's not real. It's a bot. It is fabricated traffic that is designed to go in, click on your ad and sometimes fill out your lead form or call the phone number. The reason it does this is because the Google system will optimize for more of that traffic. So it knows if it pings a conversion in your account, it will continue to opt Google, maximize conversions or any kind of automated system will continue to optimize for that traffic and it'll send more traffic to these suspicious spam sites. Search partners, like search partners, Search partner traffic wants more search partner traffic. And it knows how to manipulate the system. And I find that it does it quite well for those that are ignorant to its schemes and its systems. So do not I. My suggestion is do not run search partners at all. Turn it off, not worth it. Most of the time it's junk traffic, low quality traffic. Number two, this one's a little less. So you know, this one's not as common, but absolutely just as egregious. I've seen it many times. You're running on the display network. So number two is the display network. You should turn off the display network, period. Here's why. I often find that the display network, when combined with search, leads you to sites that are built for ads. These are again fully automated. They're written by AI. They're written, you know, they're not. You try and read, read these sites, I mean, you can tell they're absolutely just junk spam. Not, you know, not written by humans. And they're designed for one thing, to get your ads to show up, to then be clicked by their bots and to drive money for their, for the people that are hosting these ads. So Google gets paid, you pay that bill and then Google pays those display network sites for their part of the system. And it should be good. In an ideal situation, this should be good traffic. You're showing up on relevant sites that are, that are familiar and searched by people that have relevant interest to your keywords. But that's often not the case. Most of the time these sites are built just for ads and it can end up spending a lot of money. Also, mobile apps are a huge part of the display network and just sites with incredibly high CTRs. You look at these display sites, the display network, you should be suspicious of any display ad that has an incredibly high click through rate. 50%, 70%. You know, obviously this is a highly suspicious system where almost every single impression is clicked by something. No, not real, it's junk, it's spam. Turn it off. So number one, search partners. Number two, display network. Number three, location setting. So this is your location targeting setting and it's really simple. This one I can get through real quick. Set that setting to people in or regularly in your targeted area. So this is a setting at the campaign level for your location targeting setting. You do not want to be targeting people interested in your area. This is especially bad with search partners. And again, I'll be getting into an example of what a campaign looks like towards the end, you know, with all these settings kind of combined and what it looks like. And if you have that setting paired with search partners, it is a bad situation indeed. All right, number four, number four is more of a symptom, more of a end result of having bad settings in your account. But if you're getting a lot of competitor names, people looking for phone numbers, people doing what's called customer support searches, you know, things like, you know, they might be searching for blue collar, blue, Blue Cross, Red shield phone number, Blue Cross, Red Shield customer support, GEICO representative, Geico phone number. You know, things like that. These types of things can be extremely destructive to the junk spam that you're getting. Now. This may not be malicious in any way, this may not be bought, but it is still spam, it's still a waste and you should absolutely be cautious about getting any of that traffic. So this is more in the case of, you know, just getting junk spam traffic, look at your search terms. Look for too many competitor names, too many names that are just, you know, just straight up your competitor's business name over and over again. Avoid those, try not to get too many of those and, you know, hopefully you can maybe this is potentially the easiest one to solve because you just solve it with negative keywords. You start blocking those and you could potentially end up with, you know, a solution very quickly. So number four could Be a solution for a lot of people and instantly stop it. You know, maybe it's coming through phrase, match, keywords or you know, some, some other kind of setting that, that's, that's more difficult to find. But in fact it can easily be isolated just through the search terms. Okay, number five is, and this is more of a mindset, more of a mind, you know, a mind system of how you're conducting your strategy. Avoid cheap traffic. Okay, so I say that because your goal should not be to get the cheapest traffic that you can get, a measurement of success is not how cheap your traffic is. If you are judging your campaign based on, ah, this year I've gotten 20% lower cost per click than I got last year. You might be falling into a optimization cycle that will kill your account. Lower cost per click is dangerous if that is your end goal. Getting cheaper and cheaper traffic will lead you to the point of spam bot junk traffic. So avoid cheap traffic. You know, avoid trying to accumulate more traffic. And to say it another way, stop optimizing for clicks. Stop optimizing your account to just get more traffic for cheaper budget. In fact, I could say something like, you know, if you're experiencing 20% click through rates, less than a dollar cost per click, 30% conversion rate, this kind of a system is if I were to audit an account and I saw an account with 20% click through rate less than a dollar cost per click, let's say 80 cents, something like that, and you know, a very high conversion rate, 15%, 20%, 30% or higher, immediately. I mean, I wouldn't spend much time at all auditing this, especially if the client's saying they're having an issue. I would immediately know that this is full of junk spam traffic. It is largely worthless traffic that is wasting money. So avoiding cheap traffic is more like just changing your perspective about how you view Google Ads. You know what your goal is with Google Ads. The problem is, is that pursuing cheap traffic can lead you down a path of metrics that look phenomenal to me. They look suspicious. To the untrained eye, they look wonderful. Your reports will shine with bright green thumbs up all over the place. You have an incredibly high click through rate. You have a very low cost per click, you have a very high conversion rate. Meanwhile, you are burning money, you are wasting money, you are spending money in a way that is not driving value to your business. And I mean, this is, you know, this is the worst situation to be in because you are fooling yourself. You're lying to Yourself. And that's the worst spot to be in because it's tough to get the real traffic. Actually the good traffic, it's expensive. The good traffic out there is tough to get and you're gonna have to work for it. You don't have to work for cheap traffic. You don't have to work for spam and bot traffic. Alright, next site links. So this one's a buried tip. Number six is site links. Because you could be drawing a lot of click through, rate traffic, spam and bot traffic through your site links. So this is not necessarily bot. I highly doubt that this would draw bots. Bots typically click on the headline of an ad. But for spam traffic, junk traffic, you know, you're just getting people that are landing on a page that you're not pointing people to check your site links, particularly the ones that are automatically generated by the Google system. You may be sending people to an old page with an old web form that you know is, you know, going into your CRM or going to your salespeople and you know, shouldn't be used at all. The page should be deleted. But perhaps there's an old site link that's driving people. There's in particular, I find that this is chronically a problem if you are using throwaway call to actions like call now or some kind of free messaging in it. Because here's what happens. You might have really good keywords. Let's say you have everything figured out and your headlines are right on. You have great headlines, great ad copy, great keywords, everything's perfect. But you have a site link that says get pricing here. What people, what happens is people don't click on the headline and they click on the site link. And it could be going to some junk page that doesn't actually have pricing on it. In fact, it's just an about us page or you know, some junk page that has no call to action. People land on that, they're like, ah, this isn't what I want. They hit the back button, they close the page, whatever, they move on, you paid for it. They didn't convert. Or maybe even worse, they did convert and you never got the web form at all. I mean this is, I see this happen all the time. Site links can be destructive to your account. And keep in mind, towards the end, I'm almost there, but I'm going to give you the real truth about what you're doing wrong here and what led to that kind of thinking that you need to put, you know, get pricing now or you know, get, you know, some kind of free offer in your site link. I'll mention that towards the very end. So number seven, there's eight, so there's just two more here. Click Fraud tools is something I must mention. I get this question a lot. People sending questions to the podcast which you can do. So paid searchpodcastmail.com happy to answer questions. I don't have any this week just because I wanted to focus on this, but click fraud tools, I won't name any, but they are out there and they are very popular. They do very well from, from what I've seen, clients like to use them. My thought is this. I don't consider them to be a solution. They're not a solution. They don't fix the problem. They're merely a safety blanket. They're merely a band aid or on a solution that has not been fixed. You can't patch bad traffic after the click. Your business will waste too much money. So do not think of click fraud tools out there that block IP addresses and scan your clicks and your website visitors for suspicious activity. This is not a solution. This is a system that, that stops the traffic from coming back after it's already happened. You've already paid for it. So this can, can, can help, I guess. But my final verdict on this is this. I have tested and have yet to see any click fraud software truly make a significant difference in the click through rate conversion rate performance of an account. It, it's not been satisfactory to me. So if you want to use it and you're comfortable with it and it's something that you're willing to pay for, great. I don't have a problem. But do not fool yourself to think that you can tread down the road of spam bot traffic and have your safety click fraud tool along your side and it somehow stops things, you know, bad things from happening. No, you're still wasting a tremendous amount of money. And then number eight is very specific. But it could be a game changer for many of you. If you have an isolated wave of spam flow through. If you have a problem with your conversions and you got a whole lot of bad leads, the system's tracking bad leads for some reason. You know, maybe, maybe your leads stopped, maybe your tag stopped working, there was a conversion outage, you might call it, or the incorrect tags on the site caused everything to track 100%. Maybe you have a 300% conversion rate all of a sudden, you know, for, for a couple weeks, couple days. What you'd want to look into is Called the data exclusion system in Google Ads. It's a way to actually block the traffic from day one to day four whenever this spam wave or doubling of the conversions happened. So it's, it's a specific tool. I'll let you know, look that up and find out, you know, a bit more about how to use it. But basically you, you tell Google I want to exclude click data conversion data. It actually excludes any activity that happened from the click. So it excludes all data from whatever days you set. So it could be two weeks or you know, one week or something like that. So the data exclusion tool could be a way, you know, if you're dealing with a more isolated issue. It would block all traffic measurements from day one to day four, day 12, or whatever you, you exclude. So that is, that is it. That's my eight ways to suggest ways to stop and bot traffic. All kinds of traffic that is, you know, critically destroying your account. Very, very destructive. And I, and I hope no one has that problem. But they do. You, you do. Many, many people do. And there are ways to stop it and put it at least at a minimum. Okay, as promised, I'm going to go through a quick example and then give you my final conclusion on how to avoid falling into these traps. Before I do optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial of their amazing tool to help you manage, report and optimize your Google Ads campaigns. Whether it's one or a hundred, the tool scales to your needs. All right, so putting it all together here, if you have a search campaign set with maximize conversions and you're running broad match keywords or Even you have 100 phrase in exact match and you have just one broad match keywords and you're running search partners and maybe you have display network turned on. And in particular if you're pairing that with location targeting, allowing for people that are interested in your geographic area, all of this is happening and you're getting really cheap clicks, you're getting clicks that are less than a dollar, your click through rate is extremely high. If all of this is happening, you are a prime target for spam bot traffic. If you have most of those turned on and maybe you don't have the display network but you have all of these other things turned on, you're using broad match keywords, you're using search partners, you have an allowance for some leniency in your geographic targeting and, and you're always bragging about how cheap your cost per click is and you have a really high Click through rate happening on your search campaigns. I warn you, you could be a victim of this. It happens very easily and I find that it grows over time. It doesn't shrink. It does not shrink. It does not stop itself. It does not self correct. It only gets worse. And here's the conclusion. Here's why this happens. It happens because when you optimize for clicks, you are optimizing for bots and spam to happen. The more things you do to try and just get people to click on your ads, the more generous you are with your ad copy, with your keywords, with your bidding, with your budget, with the networks that you're showing on, with the geographic areas that you're showing ads to, the more possibility you have to get bot spam, junk traffic. In fact, if you're following all of Google's recommendations, you are encouraging clicks. That's what Google's recommendations are. It encourages clicks. It finds ways to help you get more traffic. That's what Google's goal is. That's not the way you should think. My recommendations that I talk about on this podcast, my recommendations that I tell my clients, my recommendations that I, that I give in my consulting calls and audits that I do for people that reach out to me@chrishaefer.com is you should optimize for conversions. You should optimize for conversions because clicks are not important. Clicks lead to conversions. But in an ideal world, you get one click, one conversion, and who cares if you got 100 clicks, you needed that conversion. Conversion. Don't brag about your conversions. Don't brag about metrics that make no revenue, that drive no value to your account. The game is to optimize for conversions. And wherever you can avoid clicks, avoid the clicks that don't drive value to your account and drive value to your business. Okay, I'll see you guys next week. Talk to you then.