Spot and stop bots from filling your ad forms

Are you running ads, and you see a spike in the lead forms getting filled? Before the numbers make you happy, pause and see if these clicks are real or fake. The click farms are upgraded these days.

They don’t stop at clicking on your ads. Instead, they fill and submit answers on your ad lead forms and generate fake leads that can manipulate your campaign data and results. According to the Statista report, the ad fraud cost will grow from $114 Bn in 2025 to $ 172 Bn by 2028.

While you think you are doing well, these bots take your marketing campaign in the wrong direction. Let’s understand these bots and see how you can stop them.

Why are bots filling ad forms?

The click farms and ad fraudsters aim to create fake conversions, which have far more impact on ad budgets and platform algorithms. Here is why they do it.

• To trick the ad algorithms: The bots filling the forms can make the ad algorithms think your campaigns are reaching genuine audiences and driving real conversions. This can change the bidding strategies, audience targeting, and platform recommendations.

• Drain the ad budget: The bots turn your ad budget into wasted spend while masking the true performance of your campaigns. The fake leads play around with the conversion metrics and make the advertisers spend more. The ad results appear successful but deliver no real ROI.

• To stop the competition: Click farms are hired to target the competition’s ads and waste their efforts and money. While this is not a fair practice, such targeting happens, and the advertisers lose money. By creating fake sign-ups or leads, they can spoil the analytics and make the competitor campaigns appear less effective, potentially affecting their ad spend decisions and strategy.

How can fake leads pollute the ad data?

Fake leads generated by bots or click farms don’t just affect your immediate ad spend. They leave a negative impact on the entire campaign.

Wrong conversion metrics

Fake leads make your campaigns successful than they actually are. When the bots fill up and submit forms, you will assume that the ads are doing well, but in reality, you are collecting fake data that is of no use.

Wrong targeting of the audience

The search engine and social media algorithms optimize the ad campaigns based on the conversion data. When fake leads are involved, platforms may optimize campaigns toward the wrong audiences. This leads to wasted ad spend targeting bots or irrelevant users.

Wrong marketing and sales moves

Fake leads don’t just end in your ad reports. They end up in your CRM, polluting your sales pipeline. Marketing automation systems are often misled by fake form submissions. Sometimes there is a trigger of unnecessary workflows and the entire effort goes to waste. Sales teams follow up on non-existent leads, costing valuable time and resources.

With all of this, the fake leads click away your budget. Imagine spending $3 on the ads and $1 being taken away by the click farms. That’s exactly what happens if you do not keep an eye on your ads.

How to spot bots filling your ad forms

Check for a sudden spike in the forms being filled

When bots fill out forms, they submit large volumes of forms in a very short period of time, often without any genuine engagement. Set up alerts for any unusual surge in form submissions to quickly act before the data gets polluted.

Look for the traffic source

If click farms are hired to attack your ad spends, they use unusual or unexpected traffic sources, such as proxies, VPNs, or low-quality websites. The other way you know that the leads are fake is when they come from regions where you don't expect form submissions.

Observe the time taken while filling in the forms

A true human lead takes the time to fill out the forms because they read everything and interact with it. If bots are programmed to fill blogs, they can complete the forms in a matter of seconds. If the forms are filled in seconds, you need to understand that it is not human.

Interpret the data filled in the forms

Before you push the filled forms to your marketing and sales team, analyze the data in it. Filter out forms with repeated email domains, back-to-back submissions of the same or generic data, fake addresses, and other such elements. Choose an ad protection system that helps you instantly block IPs when such activity happens.

Check the engagement on the landing page

When genuine leads the landing page from an ad, they interact with the page and spend time on it before filling out the forms. Bots don’t engage with the page in a way that real users do. You can use a behaviour analytics tool with a session recording feature to identify this activity.

Use WEMASY’s Ad Protection System to stop the bots

Along with being smart to identify the bot activity, you need to have smart click fraud protection tools that help you prevent fraudulent activities. The Ad Protection System WEMASY has been built with advanced AI and machine learning to identify and block fraudulent activity, including bots filling out your lead forms.

With techniques like geolocation tracking, device fingerprinting, real-time activity analysis, and more, our system instantly blocks the IPs and alerts you about the activity. In short, our Ad Protection System protects your campaigns from fraud and ensures your data stays clean. Try it for your ads and improve the quality of your leads.

Frequently Answered Questions

Why is the bot activity of filling forms not okay?

If you don’t catch bots, your ad spend will keep increasing without delivering real results. The activity of a bot filling your forms gives you a satisfied feeling that you are getting leads, but in reality, all of the leads are fake. If this happens to your ads, you lose the money invested in the ads. The time and effort your team takes to perform sales and marketing activities. before and after getting the lead goes wasted. Besides this, your data collected gets polluted,

How can the bots detect my ad’s quality score?

The quality score of your ad, interpreted by the ad platforms, is based on engagement. A surge in fake activity makes your ads look more successful than they are, causing mis-optimization. This leads to higher costs and ineffective targeting, reducing your ad performance.

Why are bots filling forms these days?

Click farms earlier would click away your ad budget with just clicks. Now that the ad protection systems are easily spotting the fake clicks, the bots are being trained to mimic human actions by filling out the forms and submitting items. Spotting such a pattern is hard, but WEMASY’s Ad Protection System is trained to identify and block such bots.

Can bots fill forms even if I’m using CAPTCHA?

Yes, they can. There are bots trained to fill in the CAPTCHA, solve puzzles, and more to complete the form submission.

Can I use WEMASY’s Ad Protection System across multiple ad campaigns?

Yes, WEMASY’s Ad Protection System works across all of your campaigns. Yuo can customize the protection rules per campaign, such as click limits, geo-targeting, and IP blocking, to ensure that all your ads remain free from bot activity and fraudulent leads.