Skewed? GA4 conversions for google campaigns

[Brad Burlingham]

Recently, we've been doing a manual audit of our form, chat and phone conversions generated by google advertising (search, vla and pmax).

Pmax: in some cases we've seen a lot of bad leads generated. the weird thing is they are real emails, but the people who own them had nothing to do with submitting leads. they are also out of state. we've also had elevated phone calls that dont seem legit. i've heard other people having this issue as well, but love to hear others insight.

VLA: in some of our stores we have seen questionably high form counts.

Does anyone have any tips on how to figure out what is causing some of the fake conversions?

Lastly, on VLA, are you seeing more phone or form conversions?

What are you thoughts on vla vs search in terms of conversions?

 

[CarlAutofusion]

Hello Brad,

PMax tends to generate a lot of service and some bad leads if you don't dial it in. Don't just turn their AI features on, otherwise, it will add a bunch of targeting you don't want and it will optimize for the easiest to generate leads (hence service leads).

Most of the time, VLAs tend to generate more calls. VLAs have cheap clicks but lower conversion rates unless you have specialized VDPs just for VLA.

To start tracing back your fake conversions, make sure you connect GA4 with the Google Ads account. Then look at what campaign(s) are generating the leads for the fake leads. You can use UTM tags within the campaigns if you need more detailed tracing.

If you need help with this, feel free to reach out to me directly. Thanks.