#leadgenerationfraud

The USA digital advertising industry significantly relies on lead generation strategies. For advertisers in the USA, landing pages are the backbone of their ad campaigns. Millions are spent each year on ads to drive traffic and capture user attention.  

But traffic is not always equal to opportunity. Marketers often notice unsettling patterns – even when dashboards show high volume of engagement and ad traffic, clicks, and form fills, somewhere conversions still lag behind. 

4,000 Leads. 18 Real Buyers. That’s the Problem. 

“More leads = more business” is one of the most expensive myths in affiliate marketing, especially in the MENA region. 

Affiliate campaigns promise scale, speed, and volume. Dashboards light up. Weekly reports look impressive. But when those leads hit your CRM, the reality is far less glamorous: duplicates, unreachable contacts, irrelevant users, and leads generated purely to meet affiliate targets, not to convert. 

You have done everything by the book. Made a fully optimized, well-researched campaign, targeted a precise audience, and got engaging creatives made by your team. Even your dashboards show that the campaigns are performing great. But what you hear from your sales team is a whole different story. 

“Fake leads, wrong phone numbers, uninterested people, never heard of the brand before” Leaving your performance credibility being questioned. It’s not that your strategy is flawed. You’ve done exactly what a high-performing Meta lead gen campaign demands, what every marketer does. 

You have done everything by the book. 

Made a fully optimized, well-researched campaign, targeted a precise audience, and got engaging creatives made by your team. Even your dashboards show that the campaigns are performing great. 

But what you hear from your sales team is a whole different story. 

“Fake leads, wrong phone numbers, uninterested people, never heard of the brand before”

Leaving your performance credibility being questioned. 

It’s not that your strategy is flawed. You’ve done exactly what a high-performing Meta lead gen campaign demands, what every marketer does. 

The problem lies in where those leads are being captured from. 

Meta’s native lead forms are built for speed and simplicity, which makes them great for collecting high volumes of leads. However, since Meta is a walled garden, a closed ecosystem,  

This gap in visibility is what allows fake sign-ups, bots, and low-intent leads to slip through. And by the time sales flag the problem, it’s too late, the budgets are spent, the data is messy, and the targets are affected. 

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.