Fake leads from paid ads, traced to their source

• Bots that fill forms. Scripts submit any form they find, sometimes with real people’s details. Google’s own help says its invalid-traffic filters “don’t prevent invalid leads on their own” and calls lead quality “a shared responsibility” (Google Ads).
• Paid humans. Click and form farms send real people to fill forms with no intent to buy.
• Per-lead incentives. Publishers, affiliates and traffic vendors paid per lead have a reason to send volume over quality, including recycled or resold contact details.
• Low-friction forms. Both platforms say their shortest forms trade quality for volume: Google’s “More volume” lead forms may include people who are less interested, and Meta’s “Higher intent” forms add a review step before submitting.

Both platforms have form settings that trade volume for quality:

• Google Ads lead forms: choose “More qualified” over “More volume” for an extra step and fewer, more interested leads (lead form types). Google also recommends reCAPTCHA, double opt-in, server-side validation and bidding toward qualified or converted leads.
• Meta instant forms: the “Higher intent” type adds a review-and-confirm step, and Meta offers phone verification by one-time code and conditional questions.
• Forms on your own site: reCAPTCHA, double opt-in and server-side checks on emails and phone numbers.

These make a fake lead harder to submit. None of them tells you which campaign, publisher or placement keeps sending them, and that is what decides where the next dollar goes.

• High CPCs. Legal, insurance, home services and finance carry some of the most expensive keywords in search, and patterns consistent with competitor clicking concentrate on exactly those terms.
• Double cost. You pay for the click, and if an automated session completes the form you pay again in sales time chasing a lead that was never a person.
• Form bots and incentivized fills. Scripts that fill any form they find, and publishers paid per lead with a reason to send volume over quality.
• CRM pollution. Fake leads distort conversion data and lead scoring, so the whole funnel optimizes on bad inputs.

A lead in your CRM tells you what someone typed. It doesn’t tell you whether a person typed it. ValidVisit judges the visit that produced the form fill Valid or Invalid, with its evidence, and attributes it to the keyword, campaign, publisher and sub-source behind it.

Send each lead to ValidVisit by server-side postback and the conversions report shows which leads came from Invalid visits. That’s the list to check before sales picks up the phone, and the list to keep out of the conversion signal your bidding learns from.

Whether you buy leads from publishers and affiliates or sell them to a buyer, quality disputes usually come down to one side’s word against the other’s. A per-visit record changes that conversation: this source, these leads, the verdict on the visit behind each one, with evidence in your dashboard.

Use it to renegotiate a source’s terms, cap it or drop it. On ad networks that credit invalid traffic, the same record supports the request: what each network’s terms say about refunds.

1. Tag every source: UTMs for search and social, the network’s own tokens for native, push and pop (tracking-token directory).
2. Add the script to every landing page that hosts a form.
3. Post leads back to ValidVisit server-side, so each lead is tied to its visit.
4. Review sources worst-first by the share of leads from Invalid visits, not by lead volume.
5. Act where you buy: exclude placements, tighten targeting, or take the record to the lead source.