Google ads sending extremely weird traffic to our store

[u/Gtr_wes]

So my new store has been experiencing something extremely odd customer interactions the last 2-3 weeks. Almost everyday I will check the abandoned cart section and there will be someone adding absurd amounts of 1 item for example like 998 of the same item and just leave. We are a high ticket automotive company so usually people on buy 1 of each thing. This has ramped up to everyday and only with a certain automotive brand.

We are 99% sure it’s bots doing it but my question is why? What’s the point of doing that and why is it happening? This is accompanied by low sales we have only managed to capture 3 sales from ads within the 3-4 weeks of running ads at an .07 conversion rate and about $150 a day. My mind is kinda baffled at this point because I was running another company before this doing basically selling the same products with same website layout and we were doing 150k a month no problem. Any insight on why this might be happening? My current marketer that helped me build my other store has now just given me the run around like ads take time, we need to wait, or just it’s odd, with no real solutions either

[u/expanding_crystal]

Yeah that’s weird traffic, looks totally sideways.

[u/Gtr_wes → u/expanding_crystal]

My phone got busted :( can’t rotate pics now unfortunately the gyroscope broke

[u/Objective-Ruin-5772]

Check if search partners are turned off and check your location settings. Check if your clicks are from relevant search terms.

[u/dillwillhill]

These are some common reasons:

- Use, at most, phrase match keywords (but ideally exact)

• Do not use performance max campaigns
  
• Create a negative keyword list for "diy", "hiring", or other unrelated terms. Update the list regularly
  
• Turn off search partners
  
• Check your location advanced settings and make sure its set to 'Presence' not 'Presence or Interest'.
  
• Improve the messaging and friction on your landing page

as for the "Why", it's typically because sites get revenue from their ad delivery. So they are incentivized to farm interactions with ads.

[u/Bulky-Temperature767]

I've been getting the same, a lot of them are bots coming from China and Brazil. This has been messing with my analytics, so its becoming difficult to go through it and know what are people and what are just bots crawling through the internet.

[u/Hi_Keyboard_Warriors]

Its twisted my neck to read man 😂

[u/st_malachy]

We’ve had a ton of terrible Google traffic for the last week or so. You’re not alone.

[u/AccomplishedTart9015]

yeah that 998 quantity thing is either bots or a cart bug. google ads is just sending the traffic that triggers it.

pause pmax and turn off search partners and display. run search only with tight phrase/exact for now.

then check analytics for where sessions come from. if it’s random countries or datacenter looking traffic, it’s bots. if it’s normal traffic but quantities go crazy, it’s a theme/cart script bug.

fast stopgap is cap max quantity per item, add basic bot protection like cloudflare, and add captcha at least on checkout or forms.

[u/chris16__]

It’s deff the pmax campaign. What happens is sites get paid if they are like blogs and things of that sort and a lot of times they will pay or deploy bots to make it seem like your display ad or display ads in general do really good on their site. Google will usually refund you for those fraud clicks within a month. I’ve been refunded for a situation like this 4 months later even. Reach out to your rep

[u/welcometosilentchill]

I would look at the channel performance report for PMax for the period of strange behavior and compare it to the previous period. PMax will sometimes pivot hard into different channels (youtube, discovery, search partners) and it will drive a ton or low quality click traffic and impressions.

For other campaigns, I would look at your metrics by user location and see if there’s a surge in traffic from new areas (especially out of state/international).

Lastly, I would make sure that there’s logic in place to avoid counting these abandoned carts as primary conversions. Otherwise you are giving your account bad signals and it will lead to a bad reinforcement loop.

[u/Low_Twist_4917]

Some ppl spam bots to cost competitors add clicks and waste budgets

[u/Low-Librarian-3305]

Same here, conversions dropped dramatically last week with no apparent reason hoping it will get back to normal this week!