How do you stop fake leads from Meta lead ads?

Why put up with junk leads at the start?

Whenever you’ve got a completely green account with no marketing history in Meta, you kind of have to throw it a bone at the start. The algorithm has nothing to go on. It doesn’t know who your customers are or what a good lead looks like, and it needs conversions to learn.

So on a new account I start with low friction. A short form, contact details up front, as easy to fill in as possible. That brings in volume, and a fair chunk of it will be junk, with fake names and made-up numbers. That’s the price of giving Meta enough data to work with.

The plan is to reduce friction, get the volume up at the beginning, give Meta a bit of data on what a lead looks like, and then switch it up.

When should you ask for contact details?

At the end, once the account has some momentum.

If you’re running a quiz or survey funnel, move the contact capture from the first screen to the last. People who’ve answered every question are invested by then. They also have a reason to give you real details, because they want their result.

Expect your lead numbers to drop, maybe by 30 to 50%. That looks bad on a report. But I’d rather pay three times as much per lead and have the sales team calling half as many people, as long as they’re real. Every call to a fake number is time your team could have spent on someone who might buy.

Should you make people verify their phone number?

If your team has to call every lead, yes. Add SMS one-time-password verification to the form. Someone gets a code on their phone, types it in, and only then does the lead come through. From that point on, you’ll only get a lead if it’s SMS verified.

That kills fake numbers and junk submissions before they reach your sales team. It also gives you cleaner data, which matters for the next step.

How do you tell Meta which leads were good?

Send the results back to it. Meta optimises toward whatever you tell it a conversion is. If a conversion is any form fill, it’ll find you more form fills. If you tell it which leads turned into qualified meetings and deals, it can go looking for more people like them.

If you own your quiz or lead tool, give each lead a score and pass that score to Meta through the Conversions API. Once we start getting lead values back, we feed them into the ad algorithm so it optimises toward the leads that are worth something.

Two bits of groundwork first. The pixel is registered to a domain, so get your funnel off any staging URL and onto its final domain before you set up tracking. And if you’d rather not build your own tool, some off-the-shelf quiz tools have a Conversions API integration built in. They’re easier to start with, but owning the platform lets you do smarter things.

What if you don’t get enough leads for Meta to learn from?

This one catches high-ticket, quote-based businesses. If enquiries only trickle in, Meta doesn’t really know what to optimise for. You’re asking it for leads, and there aren’t enough of them for it to learn.

Meta is always looking for an event to optimise for. That’s how Meta advertising works, and Google works the same way. Both understand standard e-commerce events like add to cart and purchase. A custom enquiry form gives them very little they recognise.

So give them an add to cart. There are two ways to do it.

• The quick fix is to fire an add-to-cart event when someone clicks your enquire button, and optimise to that.
• The bigger build is to turn your quote into a cart. People configure options and add-ons, add them to a quote, get the quote emailed to them, and the deal lands in your CRM.

Either way, you can now go to Meta and Google and tell them to optimise for people adding to cart, which you couldn’t do before. It also opens up retargeting on cart activity, Shopping placements and dynamic product ads. And your sales team gets a better-educated lead, because that person has already been through the options.