Lead generation fraud detection guides cost marketers and agencies money, tarnish brand reputations, impact ROI, and throw off analytics and tracking. The good news is that fraud prevention strategies are aplenty, with some methods more effective than others. The key is to know the most common types of lead generation fraud, how to spot them, and ways to protect your forms from bad actors.

The first step to preventing fraud is to closely monitor lead quality metrics, such as conversion rate and average duration of website visit. Low rates in these categories often indicate that a lead is fraudulent. It’s also essential to review lead data for nonsensical information, as well as suspicious activity patterns like multiple form submissions from the same device or IP address in a short period of time.

How to Identify Bots and Malware Connections Using Advanced Tools

Fake lead reselling, incentive fraud, and bot traffic are among the most common forms of lead fraud that plague marketing teams. Each of these strategies can result in squandered advertising budgets, a loss of valuable customer relationships, and a negative hit to the company’s reputation.

To combat these threats, use fraud detection tools that deploy a Javascript tag on forms and landing pages to capture device and session user signals and detect bad bots. These solutions, such as Spider AF, can also use advanced algorithms that mimic human behavior and detect data manipulation to flag and block invalid traffic. Lastly, using data exclusion audiences in advertising platforms like Google Ads or Facebook allows you to prevent ads from being shown to users who’ve been flagged as fake.