The onslaught of spam in Google Ads isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a dirty, lowdown, no-good, direct threat to your advertising and online presence.

For businesses relying on Google Ads, spam can distort campaign metrics, inflate costs, and even damage your overall website performance.

Fighting off relentless spammers is critical for maintaining the integrity of your ads and protecting your marketing budget.

Know The Threat

Spammers wreak havoc in multiple ways, with many using AI-driven bots to up their game significantly. These programs, designed to simulate human behavior, can flood your forms with fake entries—filling out all fields with seemingly relevant words. They can also launch click-fraud attacks on your Google Ads or attempt to hack user accounts. (Click fraud happens when a bot or an individual pretends to be a legitimate web visitor, repeatedly clicking on ads or other links to distort analytics, reduce your revenue, and more.) These bots often generate spam leads, which are fake or low-quality submissions resulting from automated activity.

However, not all spam leads come from bots. Some are generated by humans submitting false data, either manually or in exchange for incentives like discounts or downloads. Both forms of spam can distort marketing metrics by driving up advertising costs through fake clicks and skewed conversions, lowering your website’s quality score.

The IMPACT team has noticed that this problem has become particularly prevalent in Google Display Campaigns, which tend to generate more impressions than search campaigns, making them an easier target. In some cases, display campaigns have shown conversions even when no clicks were recorded—clear signs of fraudulent activity. To combat this, we’ve refined clients’ display targeting to exclude certain websites and apps where spam is suspected to originate.

Enter CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA

One of the most common – and effective – ways to fend off spam bots is through CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). CAPTCHA works by presenting users with simple tasks that humans can easily solve but which are difficult for bots, such as identifying images or solving basic puzzles. IMPACT ensures that CAPTCHA is enabled on all websites that we oversee or control.

Google’s reCAPTCHA, one of the most popular versions, uses sophisticated techniques like machine learning to detect bots, often without requiring users to solve puzzles at all. With reCAPTCHA v3, for instance, Google monitors user behavior in the background to determine if someone is human or a bot, reducing the friction for real users while filtering out harmful traffic.

Despite these advantages, reCAPTCHA alone may not stop advanced spammers. Some of the more sophisticated scripts can mimic human behavior or use machine learning to bypass these tests. This is why reCAPTCHA is most effective when combined with additional anti-spam strategies.

Additional Ways to Fight Spam

1. Honeypots: Honeypots are an elegant solution that involves creating invisible form fields designed to trap bots. While human visitors can’t see or interact with these fields, bots will attempt to fill them out, exposing their identity as spam generators. Honeypots are effective at stopping simpler bots without negatively impacting user experience, though more advanced bots are known to evade this trap.
2. Spam Filters: In addition to using CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, websites can implement stronger spam filters. For instance, Gravity Forms Zero Spam offers more robust protection, though it can be strict and might filter out some legitimate leads. While effective, businesses must constantly strike a balance between protecting against spam and ensuring real prospects aren’t lost.
3. Check IP Addresses: To further combat spam, you can track the IP addresses of suspicious form submissions. By using services like Arin.net, you can identify and block recurring spam sources. This added layer of security helps you filter out known bad actors from interacting with your website.

Practical Tips for Warding Off Spam

To help further reduce spam submissions, there are a few additional steps you can take:

• Increase the number of required fields on your forms: Bots typically struggle with more complex forms. By requiring six or more fields, you make it more difficult for automated systems – and lazy humans – to submit fake entries. But here’s a huge caveat: longer, more complex forms often create a bad user experience! In fact, we frequently advise clients to cut their form length to increase form submissions. Remember what we said about striking a balance?!
• Avoid marking website form emails as spam: If you’re using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to process form emails, marking them as spam could impact your reputation as a sender and inadvertently lead to Amazon marking all emails from your site as spam. Instead, delete spam manually.
• Partner with a Digital Marketing Expert: Implementing these anti-spam measures can be complex and time-consuming. The best results often come from a layered approach, combining several tactics to fully protect your website and ads from different forms of spam. This is where partnering with a trusted digital marketing expert comes in. A knowledgeable partner can guide you through the setup and management of these tools, ensuring your site remains spam-free while optimizing your ad campaigns.

Questions? We’re always willing to lend a hand.