If you are selling products or services online in the US, there’s a good chance that you have dabbled with performance marketing or pay-per-call (PPC) campaigns, as they are commonly called. In fact, these days, in order to drive any kind of business online at scale, PPC campaigns have emerged as a necessity, and for good reason.
In a perfect world, PPC campaigns have the potential to provide businesses with high-intent leads that can easily be converted into paying customers. Many brands have deployed significantly large teams of sales experts to handle the leads generated by PPC campaigns and drive conversions.
Unfortunately, the world isn’t perfect, and modern PPC campaigns are plagued with lead generation fraud. Fraudsters use a variety of simple and sophisticated techniques to defraud advertisers and waste their ad spending while making a quick buck in the process. The worst part is that the wasted ad spend has just a short-term impact on such fraudulent activities. In the longer run, scammers can skew the metrics that advertisers use to plan their campaigns. As a result, lead generation fraud can have lasting effects on any brand’s PPC performance.
Let us look at this problem in more detail.
The Problem: How Lead Generation Fraud is Hurting Pay-Per-Call Campaigns
Lead generation fraud is a huge problem, especially for advertisers operating at a large scale. This problem can be made easy to understand by breaking it down into its components:
1. Fake and Invalid Leads
The most noticeable impact of fake campaigns is the fake lead generation with the use of bots and duplicates. Fraud publishers employ bots and in some cases, real people to click on ads and generate calls. However, since these calls are generated with the sole purpose of defrauding the advertisers and securing unethical monetary gains for the fraudsters, they have no real intent behind them and never convert into paying customers. The only losing party in this mix is the advertiser who ends up paying for calls that have no chance of converting, no matter how well a sales team works on them.
2. High Volume Of Fake Engagements
Fake and invalid leads generated with the use of bots of poorly paid employees of fraud publishers generate a lot of engagement but drive no real value. In fact, they drain ad budgets that could otherwise drive engagements that boost the business’ bottom line. Similarly, the fake calls generated also engage call center resources that could be otherwise used to engage with genuinely interested prospects. This reduces the operational efficiency of the call centers.
3. Lack Of Pre-Call Filtering Mechanisms
Most businesses don’t have a mechanism for lead validation designed for filtering out bad and fake leads before their call gets connected to their call center. This results in increased cost-per-acquisition (CPC) for the advertiser.
Impact of Lead Generation Fraud on Brands
The impact of lead generation fraud on a brand’s campaigns may not always be obvious. However, knowing where to look can work to the advantage of advertisers trying to make the most out of their PPC efforts:
1. Revenue Drain
If a brand has fallen victim to lead generation fraud, it means that they are spending a portion of their ad spend on fake leads. Depending on the severity of the problem, this wasted budget can make up a significant portion of the advertiser’s total ad budget.
2. Call Center Inefficiencies
Fake leads, after an advertiser has unwittingly paid for them, land as calls to their sales team. As a part of their responsibilities, sales teams have to take these calls and spend valuable time attending to them. Since they never even have a chance of resulting in a sale, the entire ordeal ends up wasting the time of valuable sales resources.
3. Brand Safety and Compliance Risks
If a brand is struggling with lead generation fraud, it usually means that its ads are being published by fraudulent publishers. The brand is also usually never aware of the kind of content hosted by such fraudulent websites. As a result of association with such publishers, the brand risks damaging their reputation and in extreme cases, failing compliance checks.
4. Distorted Marking Analytics
Finally, such instances of fraud have the potential to skew the very advertising metrics that advertisers use to inform their campaign strategies. If, for instance, an advertiser notices that ads with a particular set of publishers are generating good engagement, they may be inclined to direct more of their budget towards these publishers. However, if the publisher is not generating genuine leads, it leads to the advertiser wasting more of their budget with them. Besides the cost of the wasted ad budget, the brand also ends up paying the opportunity cost of not directing their budget towards genuine publishers that could have enabled them to access genuinely interested prospects.
Real Case
This problem is exemplified by the case study of one of our clients operating in the banking sector. Our client was struggling with poor lead quality, with some campaigns registering as many as 98% of generated leads as fake. Besides the fake leads being sent their way from bad affiliates, the other challenge our client was facing was to improve the efficiency of their quickly growing call center, something that was being plagued by the menace of fake leads.
Let’s look at how we helped our client overcome these issues with our tool’s state-of-the-art validation features.
How mFilterIt Solves the Problem
Leveraging its advanced AI-enabled technology, mFilterIt helps advertisers gain transparency in their lead funnel. Here are a few ways it solves the lead gen fraud issue for advertisers:
1. AI-Powered Click-To-Call Validation Mechanism
Our AI-powered validation mechanism is designed to detect bot-driven call interaction. This is made possible with behavioral and network analysis to identify patterns and detect bot activity. Leveraging this feature, the mFilterIt tool is able to execute reliable lead validation before the call is ever initiated. This, in turn, improves call center efficiency by eliminating fake call connections.
2. Lead Scoring and Prioritization
Next, we deployed our Lead Scoring system. The system works on a simple principle, to analyze behavioral and network data to determine the quality of leads. The system ranks leads based on intent and authenticity. This allows sales teams to get an objective view of the quality of individual leads, allowing them to prioritize them and direct most of their energy and time towards high-quality leads with the highest chance of converting.
3. Device and Behavioral Tracking for Lead Verification
Our tool also analyses device signatures to pinpoint fake leads. Moreover, with IP tracking and visit intent scoring, we were able to paint an accurate picture of the percentage of fake leads in the campaigns.
These features enabled our client to ascertain the severity of their fake lead generation problem. However, we did not stop there.
4. Real-Time Blocking of Fraudulent Leads
Once we had identified the fake leads and their sources, we took action. Our tool is designed to blacklist fraudulent IP addresses, devices, and affiliates that repeatedly fail on our lead validation parameters. This way, over the span of just a few days, we were able to eliminate almost every bad actor operating within our client’s advertising mix, allowing them to save themselves from paying for non-legitimate leads.
Results: How Brands Benefit from Fraud Prevention
Impact-focused lead validation and lead scoring, coupled with prompt action against the perpetrators of fake lead generation can deliver incredible impact for any brand engaged with PPC and struggling with lead generation fraud. With the fraud eliminated, brands can expect to experience the following benefits:
✅ Higher Conversion Rates- While fraud detection and prevention activities may lead to a slight dip in the number of leads generated, they can instantly and significantly improve the average quality of leads. This, in turn, can lead to great improvements in conversion rate and subsequently, the efficiency of the sales team or call center.
✅ Reduced Marketing Waste- This is an obvious benefit. When brands don’t waste their money on poor quality leads or completely fake leads, they are able to save more money to spend on authentic leads that have a good chance of converting to paying customers.
✅ Enhanced Call Center Productivity- This benefit is an extension of the previous one. With access to high-quality leads, call center teams will be able to deliver stellar productivity.
✅ Better data for decision-making- Finally, the absence of fake leads leads to better quality analytics as everything is reported with authenticity and honesty. With accurate data, advertisers can make sound optimization decisions and transform the results of their PPC efforts.
Conclusion
PPC fraud is a serious issue that may be costing advertisers billions of dollars in wasted ad spending every year. Moreover, the wasted ad spend is simply the tip of the iceberg. This type of lead generation fraud leads to skewed metrics, bad optimization decisions, and wasted time for highly paid sales teams.
Brands looking to maximize their Pay-Per-Call campaigns should invest in advanced lead validation solutions like filters to protect their budgets and enhance efficiency.
To get transparency on your lead quality, get in touch with our experts!
