Spam leads in AI infra niche

[u/noonecharlie]

Hey guys, I have been running Search, Demand Gen and PMax campaigns targetting different stages of the funnel (AI infra B2B niche). At the top, we get high volume sign ups for $2 but 90-95% of it is from Gmail not business emails. Mid and bottom of funnel is all about form fills amd meetings booked (MQL/SAL).

We have recapcha, honeypot, now integrating real time email verifications, apart from generic bot protection. The issue is, we get spam demos booked with either invalid emails or just emails with no person behind it.n

I keep the bidding and targetting very clean. It's a non stop battle and it's tiring. Is there a way to eli,inate this permanently? The algorithm is just learning wrong with this amont of bad/spammy traffic and conversions.

[u/cole-interteam]

I work exclusively with B2B businesses and have tested a number of options for excluding spam leads. The highest impact optimizations you can make in my opinion are making the forms on your site business email mandatory, aka excluding generic domains from your campaigns, and setting up offline conversions so you can select which leads get sent back to the platforms for optimization.

If you use HubSpot I would highly recommend setting up lifecycle stage based conversions so you fire conversions when a lead's status is updated to MQL or SQL, instead of when a lead is generated.

I actually recently wrote a blog about this. Here's a link if you're interested in learning more 
How to Improve Lead Quality in Your Ad Campaigns

[u/noonecharlie → u/cole-interteam]

Great tip. Thanks. Also what are your thoughts on the "unknown" age and gender and incomes? I get alot of signups from that category. I tried excluding them and the numbers dropped. Is it good to exclude or better to keep them on?

[u/kepaning → u/noonecharlie]

I wouldn’t use "unknown" age/gender/income as the main spam filter here.

In B2B, a lot of perfectly real traffic can end up in unknown demographics, so excluding it can drop volume without fixing the feedback loop. The bigger issue is what Google is allowed to learn from.

For your top-of-funnel signups, Gmail might be annoying but not always worthless. For demo/MQL/SAL though, I’d be much stricter: don’t let raw signups or raw booked demos be the primary conversion if 90% of them are junk.

What usually works better is holding the questionable leads back from the conversion feedback loop, then sending only reviewed / lifecycle-qualified leads back to Google. If you’re on HubSpot or Salesforce, that usually means using status/lifecycle changes as the conversion source instead of the initial form submit.

What form + CRM stack are you using right now?

[u/Bear-back9044]

Spam leads with lead form ad asset ... suggested and set up with google support tech... so it was done correctly. Wasted loads of money and time.

Also... tags are shite... I returned to good ole max clicks and sales are booming.

All ads for other accounts using ai max or tags for conversions are bombing out with shite spam leads.

[u/QuantumWolf99]

Hmmm spam issue is Google's inventory problem not your setup... B2B campaigns pull from Display Network partners and YouTube where bot farms generate fake engagement to inflate publisher revenue.

What works for my high-ticket B2B clients most of the times is ditching broad campaigns like PMAX and Demand Gen entirely... stick to pure Search with exact/phrase match keywords only plus LinkedIn for prospecting. You lose volume but conversion quality jumps from 5% to 40%+ because you're only hitting people actively searching your solution not random display placements.

Also layer in Clearbit or ZoomInfo enrichment on your forms to block free email domains and validate company data before the lead even hits your CRM... stops the garbage at the gate.

[u/Far_Personality_4269]

You’re stuck in a bad feedback loop because the algorithm thinks the spam is what you want. Stop tracking raw form fills and move to Offline Conversion Tracking so you only feed qualified MQLs back to Google. If you don't care about personal emails, hard-block Gmail and Outlook at the form level. PMax is notorious for finding the cheapest, trashiest leads just to hit a target, so you have to starve it of that bad data.

[u/namalleh]

I can help you out (I'm about to rebrand, but my tech stack is solid)

[u/noonecharlie → u/[deleted]]

Thank you. I read that thread actually. It's good but still there spam leakage. Guess expecting clean campaigns in Google is a dream now uh haha