It’s a well-known fact within the world of PPC that PMax can quite often be a ‘black box’ when trying to optimise the campaign. Even with the Channel Performance update, it can still be a minefield.
Given this is a heavily conversion-based campaign type, it can often become lazy and go for the ‘easy’ conversions. This means that despite the strong quality signals you provide, it can often bring in spam conversions. We have found that most of the time, these are bots filling out your submission form.
We have recently seen our lead generation clients suffer from this, especially when the customer journey requires sales team intervention. Here is how we’ve hacked the PMax Black Box to remove those spam leads and produce high quality conversions for our clients.
Our Approach To Reducing Spam Leads
The client started to experience a problem with the quality of the leads, specifically from PMax. The leads coming through were either fake or poor. This was highlighted through continual feedback from the sales team.
By analysing the UTM codes, we were able to establish the spam leads coming from one specific PMax campaign. Result! — or so we thought!
Given we were able to pinpoint the exact campaign, we reviewed our PMax Placement Report and noticed we were appearing heavily on inappropriate videos and sites (e.g. Trump & The Epstein Files and dating apps). We then started to add content suitability exclusions, and over the next couple of weeks we saw the number of spam leads drop but this continued to fluctuate week on week.
That was until Channel Reporting was released! We had already started to realise the spam leads would peak at the end of the month. Now we had actual data (e.g. number of impressions) for the different placement, and we quickly realised that our YouTube impressions would increase dramatically towards the end of the month too.
This led us to conclude YouTube was the trouble placement! So, what did we do? We removed all videos from the PMax campaign.
The Results
Spam leads fell by 100%! What a success!
The overall conversion volume dropped, leading to an increase in CPA, however, this was now a more accurate CPA given these are all now ‘real people’ converting, rather than bots, so we were happy.
However, our placement on YouTube didn’t fall entirely. Why is this you may ask? Well, given PMax campaigns utilise ALL of Google’s inventory, you will always have some sort of placement on YouTube.
How is this? Well, Google will simply scan through your image assets, text assets (headlines and descriptions) and your landing page and automatically generate the video for you.
These videos are quite often poor quality, so you must ensure you review what Google is putting together without telling you. I would recommend reviewing what Google puts together, and if this is poor quality, just upload 1 video.
Regardless of the data, what was the most pleasing result was that the client was now able to spend most of their time pursuing the real people to book a holiday, rather than nobody answering the phone to them.
Has your business been battling with spam leads coming through your PPC campaigns? Are you constantly seeing an increase in ‘bot’ activity on your site? Get in touch with us, and we can ‘optimise your PMax campaign to generate high-quality leads’ for you.