How to Stop Bots Filling Out Your Leads Form on Meta Ads

Running lead generation ads on Meta can be a great source of potential customers, however at some point in their campaign many businesses begin to face a rather annoying problem, bot leads.

Your campaign might look good at first glance. Leads are coming in steadily and your cost per lead is looking like a steal. After you check the leads themselves, you will see many are fake, incomplete or simply unreachable.

These lead form bots waste your time, distort campaign metrics, and can make it very hard to determine what your actual advertising efforts are yielding. Fortunately, there are ways a business can combat low-quality leads and bot submissions.

Why Are Bots Filling Out Meta Lead Forms?

Meta lead generation campaigns are structured to make filling out information as fast and frictionless as possible. While making a form easy to fill out can significantly increase the conversion rates, it also makes your leads susceptible to bots, automated responses and poor-quality leads.

In some cases, bots may complete forms automatically. In others, users may submit inaccurate information simply because the process requires very little effort. This typically results in a business with leads that cannot be contacted or have no interest in their products or services. This is more likely to happen in broad targeting campaigns or with campaigns that have very few qualifying questions in their lead form.

Review Your Targeting

Reviewing how you’re targeting on Meta is one of the most efficient ways to decrease poor quality leads. When your targeting is too wide, Meta may serve to people more likely to submit a form than genuinely interested in your business. This usually brings the cost per lead down but at the expense of quality.

Your targeting should be as close as possible to your customer profile, with settings for location, demographics, interests, behaviours and custom audiences possibly adjusted accordingly. More targeted audience usually means less leads in general, but with much higher quality.

Here at Chameleon Web Services, we help businesses to create a targeting strategy with quality being the priority over quantity, saving your business money.

Use Higher Intent Lead Forms

Meta offers multiple variations of lead forms, one type is focused on increasing submissions, the other on quality leads.

Higher Intent forms insert an extra step of review before submission. This step forces users to review and confirm their information prior to completing their form which causes friction and drastically decreases incorrect form submissions, leading to a better-quality lead. This may reduce conversion rates slightly, but leads generated may yield better quality leads and campaign results. This is an easy fix for a lot of businesses.

Add a Custom Question to your Lead Form

Perhaps the easiest way to cut down on bots, and therefore improve your leads, is to ask some extra qualifying questions within your lead form.

Instead of just asking for their name, email and phone number. You can add a few questions designed to sift out those that are not serious prospects.

These can be related to project requirements, budget, business size, service interests etc. Serious users are much more likely to answer this type of question correctly whereas poor quality forms would fall by the wayside.

The intention here is not to create an impossibly difficult form, but creating a little bit of friction and the need for human input will significantly reduce the bots filling out the forms. This will in turn increase your cost per lead, however it’s much better to pay £5 for a quality lead with genuine interest than to have £1 per lead full of bots and accidental fill outs.

Don’t Optimise Solely for Cost Per Lead

Some companies concentrate entirely on getting their cost per lead as low as possible. Although, cost per lead is an essential factor to be monitored, often, the least expensive lead is not the best lead.

The Meta algorithm can and will produce the results which you asked for. When optimising exclusively for the number of leads, the platform will then look to attract people who will be most likely to fill in the form (which won’t always result in a genuine query).

Fewer, higher quality enquiries will typically be far more beneficial to a business than large numbers of fraudulent or unqualifiable leads. Companies need to look at lead quality in relation to the other statistics in their campaigns to measure campaign performance more effectively.

We can assist companies with understanding their campaign performance based upon real business goals.

Consider Directing Traffic to Your Website

Meta lead forms can and do produce great results. However, for some businesses it makes sense to direct traffic to your own website and collect customer information using an online form.

A website form will give you a greater degree of control over the users experience and will usually allow for greater lead qualification. This gives businesses more security measures to put in place like CAPTCHA’s, anti-spam controls and more.

Landing pages will allow businesses to gather more information before they receive the enquiry, thereby producing a higher quality lead with a better intention.

This method is something to try for any business having continued problems with bot form submissions.

Regularly Check Your Lead Quality

Many businesses only discover the bot issue after weeks of their campaign running.

Reviewing the leads that are being submitted at regular intervals can help you spot any problems before they begin to become a real issue. Pay attention for patterns like suspicious email addresses, non-existent details, duplicate submissions and impossible information.

Regular checks of your lead quality will enable you to tweak your targeting, forms and campaign settings before too much money has been spent on ineffective advertising. The quicker the problem is detected, the simpler the fix.

The Importance of Professionally Managed Campaigns

Advertising on Meta has never been more complex. Although there are extensive tools and features in terms of targeting and lead generation, success requires ongoing managed optimisation and continuous monitoring.

Many businesses focus on generating leads but overlook the importance of lead quality. Without proper campaign management, advertising budgets can quickly be consumed by poor-quality traffic and ineffective submissions.

At Chameleon Web Services, we assist businesses to professionally manage and optimise Meta ad campaigns to generate better quality leads, not waste advertising budgets and ensure real value.