VLA ads and inflated click to calls

[Brad Burlingham]

Hi all, we are seeing VLA ads showing on display network once again and that means a ton of "fake" calls. I saw this happen to us at the end of last year, but its happening again. We discovered it happening at 5 of our dealerships and its happening across several vendors. IF you have access to your google ads account, you can look at pmax campaigns by channel. if you are showing on display network, its a waste of money.

Since google doesnt allow you to turn off display, you need to block certain sites (i'm not talking about the partner network) and rethink what you are optimizing for. If you are including click to call as one of your optimized events, this might be the culprit.

Anyone else having these issues and or have some hacks on preventing it. i hate google!

 

[ryan.leslie]

DM'd you @Brad Burlingham. I'm in the office this week and can grab an analyst. Let me know if I can help.

 

[CarlAutofusion]

Hi Brad, Are you running VLA-only campaigns? We have found some of our VLA-only campaigns only show on Search and others run on both Search and Display. Same settings.
For those running on both Search and Display, we use placement and content exclusions to limit the amount of ads showing on Display. There's no way to completely eliminate the Display ads as far as we know because we can only exclude the ads once they show up on Display but this does reduce it by quite a bit.
Hope this helps.