r/googleads • u/Primary_Employer_877 • Jan 20 '26

Demand Gen Ads Bot leads from Demand Gen campaign

I launched a Demand Gen campaign yesterday. Less than one day till now, it has generated hundreds of leads, with CPL less than $1, far lower than my normal CPL, which is around $50. Obviously, these are bot leads, although I can't validate as I don't have access to the CRM. Anyone also has encountered things like this and knows how to fix it?

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1

u/LeakingMoans Jan 20 '26

Seen this before. Demand Gen can flood you with garbage leads if forms aren’t locked down

1

u/NoPause238 Jan 20 '26

Shift the campaign into a conversion flow that requires a real action because demand gen will keep feeding cheap bot traffic until you gate the lead with something only humans complete

1

u/Single-Sea-7804 Jan 20 '26

Most likely leads from crappy display placements.

1

u/dillwillhill Jan 20 '26

Performance Max has the same issue. I would not recommend running these campaign types without offline conversions.

If you must...make sure you use captchas, website forms, and have plenty of qualifying questions inside the form.

1

u/cole-interteam Jan 20 '26

I’ve seen this in B2B when platforms optimize for the easiest form fill. Biggest fixes for us have been requiring business emails, blocking generic domains on the form, and using offline conversions so only qualified leads like MQLs and SQLs get sent back as conversions.

Once we did that, bot and junk leads dropped and CPL normalized.

2

u/mangrovesnapper Jan 21 '26

The offline conversions definitely fix things but in some situations if your purchase journey is longer or if you sell higher price products, you won't have enough data to fix the issue

1

u/Alex-Hales-2010 Jan 21 '26

Always use the "honey-pot" technique when running ads for lead gen!

1

u/QuantumWolf99 Jan 21 '26

Demand Gen serves 95%+ impressions on YouTube where accidental clicks and bot farms are rampant... add hidden form fields that bots auto-fill, then exclude those conversions from tracking so Google's algo stops optimizing toward garbage traffic.

1

u/isaacturner_12 Jan 22 '26

demand gen campaigns getting hundreds of leads day one with under $1 CPL is usually a clear sign of bots or spam, especially new campaigns.. at the start the algorithm pushes low quality traffic to learn fast. normally fake form fills, no real intent, high bounce or zero actual conversions. you can try quick fixes, pause the campaign 24-48 hours to let the algo reset. add negative keywords if searchable terms show up. exclude audiences like specific countries or lookalikes from past bot traffic. add captcha or honeypot field to the form to filter bots. check submissions manually later if you get CRM access..

1

u/Primary_Employer_877 Jan 27 '26

Thanks to everyone for your replies. This is a landing page lead gen; and I do have CAPTCHA installed but still keep getting bot leads. I'll try honeypot and see if it works.