“We get plenty of enquiries from ads, but no customers.” Sometimes the reason is simple: part of those enquiries are not from customers at all. Made-up names, numbers like “111”, empty messages, emails from other countries. The ad brought a person (or a bot) to your site, the form accepted it, and a “lead” appeared in your table.
First, the limits of this text. It is not about click fraud (when competitors or bots click your ad): we have a separate article on that. This one is about something else: what to do when the click is real but the enquiry is junk. We checked the facts against Google’s help on 18 October 2026. What comes from practice rather than from Google’s help, we label as such.
1. Google doesn’t filter spam in forms on its own
Google’s help page “Prevent invalid leads” says it directly: invalid traffic filters on their own do not prevent invalid leads, because most traffic checks happen after your ad has served. A person or a bot can still reach your site and submit a form with made-up data. And lead quality, in Google’s words, is a shared responsibility: its defences protect you from being charged for invalid traffic, but you must put technical safeguards on your own site.
Check it yourself (5 minutes). Open the last 20 enquiries in your email or CRM (the system where you keep your customers). How many are junk: made-up names, numbers that do not exist, meaningless messages? Write the number down. Without it, nothing else can be judged.
2. Does your form check anything at all
Google recommends three safeguards on the form itself. Here is each in plain words:
- reCAPTCHA is an “I am not a robot” check that filters out programs.
- Email confirmation by a link (Google calls it double opt-in): after the form is sent, the person gets an email with a link, and the enquiry counts as real only once they click it.
- Server-side validation: the site itself checks that the email domain exists and the phone number looks real before the enquiry reaches your CRM. The help explains why: sophisticated bots bypass browser controls and post fake data straight to your form.
Check it yourself. Send yourself a test enquiry with the email “aaa@aaa” and the number “111”. If it arrived, the form checks nothing. Then the task for whoever builds your site is concrete: add at least one of the three checks. One message with a screenshot of the test enquiry is enough.
Two caveats. First, the help does not say which reCAPTCHA version to use or what threshold to set; that is for whoever configures your site. Second, if your site serves customers in the EU or Poland, reCAPTCHA loads a third-party script, so the question of consent for it is worth agreeing with your developer. We wrote about consent and cookies separately. We found no official requirement specifically about reCAPTCHA in Google’s help; it is only a reason to ask.
One more trap from colleagues’ practice: a form is cut down to three fields and enquiries immediately go up. But spam goes up too. Judge such a form not by the number of enquiries but by the deals that closed from them.
3. Where the enquiries come from
Spam often comes from outside your city. If the enquiries show foreign countries and you work in one city, look at the location settings. In Google Ads: Campaigns → Campaigns → Settings → the Locations panel. There are two options:
- “Presence or interest”: the ad is shown to people in your chosen locations and to those who showed interest in them.
- “Presence”: only to people physically in your chosen locations.
Opinions differ here, and we hide neither side. Google’s help recommends the first, broad option for Search ads, and suggests “Presence” when your business is in a sensitive vertical with strict targeting limits or when you want to reach only people actually in the right place. Practitioners in chats, on seeing foreign spam, often set exactly “Presence” and also exclude the country it comes from. One case from a professional chat: in the account, enquiries showed as coming from Kyiv, while in analytics the same enquiries had the source “India”. That is one case with no numbers, and the cause of the mismatch was never found. So do not draw conclusions from it; do two things instead: see which option is set in your campaign, and whether it matches whom you want to reach.
4. Don’t count every form submission as an enquiry
Ads learn from what you called an enquiry. If any form submission counts, spam teaches the ads to look for more of the same spam. Google’s help recommends optimising towards goals such as “qualified lead” (an enquiry you have confirmed as real), “converted lead” (an enquiry that reached a deal), booking an appointment or requesting a quote.
From practice: when the conversion tag sits right on the form submission, bots produce fake conversions in the account. That is practitioners’ conclusion, not a Google rule, but it matches the logic of the help. Another trick from a chat, also without final confirmation: compare in GA4 (Google’s analytics system) the time from starting the form to sending it. If four fields are “filled in” within 3–4 seconds, or several submissions go through within a second, that is more likely a program than a person.
How to pass Google a result rather than the mere fact of an enquiry, we covered in the articles on what your ads count as a lead and on offline conversions. Remember the main point here: spam that gets into “conversions” will only multiply.
5. Money: what Google refunds and what it doesn’t
Google does not charge for invalid clicks: the system removes them from reports and payments. If an invalid click is found after you were already billed, the help says a credit on your next invoice may be possible “when appropriate and possible”. There is a nuance: if a click that led to a conversion is later marked invalid, the click disappears from the statistics, but the conversion itself remains.
Check it yourself. In your campaign report, add the “Invalid clicks” column and see how many Google filtered out on its own. Just do not mix up two different things: the column holds only clicks Google judged invalid. A spam enquiry from a real click does not become invalid traffic, and the money for such a click, by our reading of the help, will not come back. Some people in chats write about a “credit for fake traffic” and about harm to automated strategies from spam above 10 %, but we found no primary source for those figures, so we do not quote them.
From our practice: a weekly habit
Once a week, mark spam in your enquiry table: just a “spam / real” column. Within a month you can see what share is junk, which campaigns it comes from and whether changes to the form helped. It is cheaper than hunting for the cause blindly, and it is easy to show your contractor specific rows.
What to ask your contractor
- What percentage of last month’s enquiries were spam, and from which campaigns?
- What counts as a conversion for us: a form submission or a real enquiry?
- Which location option is set in the campaigns, and why?
- Does the form have at least one of the three checks?
Summary
Google protects you from paying for invalid clicks, but not from junk enquiries in a form. Check five things:
- how many of the last 20 enquiries are junk;
- whether your form filters anything (the “aaa@aaa” and “111” test);
- where enquiries come from and which location option is set;
- what exactly counts as a conversion;
- the “Invalid clicks” column in the report.
How we set up search campaigns is in the search advertising section.
Lots of enquiries but no customers? Want a free audit of your Google Ads? Send us a request — we will look at your account and tell you how much is going to junk right now.