Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out!
I've had a look at the problem you're having with fake leads on Facebook. It's a really common issue, especially with Lookalike audiences and standard Lead Forms, but the fix usually isn't about finding a better bot-blocking tool. It's almost always a deeper problem with the underlying strategy – who you're talking to and what you're offering them. You're right to be concerned about wasting tens of thousands, and it's a hole that needs plugging fast.
I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on how we'd approach this. The solution isn't to find a magic setting to exclude bots, but to fundamentally shift your approach from chasing cheap leads to attracting high-quality prospects who actually want to hear from you.
TLDR;
- Your Lookalike audiences are likely built from low-quality source data, so Facebook is just finding more low-quality users for you. You need to build audiences from high-intent actions instead.
- Standard Lead Forms have almost no friction, which makes them a magnet for fake or low-intent submissions. You need to add 'positive friction' to pre-qualify leads before they even submit their details.
- Stop defining your customer by simple demographics. The most powerful way to target is by understanding their specific, urgent 'nightmare' problem that you can solve. This changes everything from your audience selection to your ad copy.
- The core issue is focusing on CPL (Cost Per Lead) instead of what you can afford to pay for a real customer. This letter includes an interactive calculator to help you work out your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and your true target acquisition cost.
Why Your Current Strategy is Attracting Junk
You mentioned that you're using Lookalike audiences because your interest targeting pool is small. This is a classic trap. You're also using Lead Forms (LF), which are designed by Facebook to be as frictionless as possible. The combination of these two things is a perfect storm for generating a high volume of low-quality leads, and here's why.
You're Paying Facebook to Find Non-Customers
This is probably the hardest truth to swallow. When you create a Lookalike audience, the quality of that audience is entirely dependent on the quality of your source data. If your source audience is, for example, 'All Website Visitors in the last 180 days', what are you actually telling the algorithm to do? You're telling it: "Go find me more people who behave like the random assortment of people who visited my website, many of whom probably bounced in 3 seconds and had no intention of ever buying anything."
The algorithm is incredibly good at its job. It will go out and find you millions of people who look just like those low-intent visitors. These are the people who are cheapest to reach because other advertisers aren't bidding for them. They are the digital window-shoppers, the tyre-kickers, the people who mindlessly click on ads while scrolling. You're essentially paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.
The same logic applies if you're building Lookalikes from 'people who engaged with your page'. An engagement can be a simple 'like' from someone who will never become a customer. You're rewarding the algorithm for finding you more people who like things, not people who buy things. The problem isn't the tool (Lookalikes); it's the raw material you're feeding it.
The Lead Form Friction Fallacy
Secondly, you're using Lead Forms. Facebook's goal is to make it as easy as possible for a user to complete an action. With a Lead Form, a user clicks the ad, their details (name, email, phone) are often pre-filled from their Facebook profile, and they just have to click 'Submit'. It takes two seconds and requires zero thought or commitment.
This is great if you're trying to maximise the *quantity* of leads. But it's terrible for *quality*. Because it's so easy, you get submissions from:
- Bots: Automated scripts that can easily fill and submit these simple forms.
- Accidental Clicks: People who didn't mean to submit but just tapped through the process.
- The Uninterested: People who are mildly curious but have no real intent. They submit because it's easy, not because they genuinely want what you're offering. They often use old or fake info they have on their profile.
Tools like ClickCease are designed to fight click fraud on platforms like Google Search, where bots are trying to drain a competitor's budget. On Facebook, the problem is often less about malicious bots and more about attracting the wrong kind of *human*. Excluding the Audience Network helps, but it doesn't solve the core strategic flaw.
Your Current Funnel
Broad Lookalike Audience (Low Intent)
Low Friction Offer
Instant Lead Form (Pre-filled)
The Result
High Volume of Fake / Junk Leads
I'd say you need a fundamental shift: From chasing volume to attracting value
To fix this, you need to stop optimising for the cheapest possible lead and start designing a system that deliberately filters for quality. This involves three main changes: redefining your customer, revamping your offer, and restructuring your campaigns around high-intent signals.
Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic
First, we need to throw out the old way of defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" or "Men aged 35-55 who like golf" is useless. It tells you nothing of value and leads to generic ads that speak to no one. To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their pain.
You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your customer isn't just a job title; they're a person terrified of a specific negative outcome.
- For a fractional CFO service, the nightmare isn't 'needing financial planning'; it's 'waking up in a cold sweat because you might not make payroll next month.'
- For a cybersecurity firm, the nightmare isn't 'requiring better security'; it's 'the CEO's name being splashed across the news because of a data breach.'
- For a home renovation company, the nightmare isn't 'wanting a new kitchen'; it's 'living in a dusty, chaotic building site for 6 months longer than promised.'
Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. Once you've isolated that nightmare, everything else falls into place. Your ad copy can speak directly to that pain. Your targeting can focus on signals related to that problem. This is the foundation of a campaign that attracts people with genuine, urgent needs.
We'll need to look at your offer...
Once you know the nightmare, you can build an offer that acts as the aspirin. But critically, your offer must also serve as a filter. Instead of a generic "Contact Us" or "Learn More" lead form, you need to create what I call 'positive friction'. You make the prospect do a small amount of work that demonstrates genuine interest and qualifies them in the process.
The "Request a Demo" button is one of the worst offenders. It presumes your prospect has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction for them, with low-value. Your offer’s only job is to deliver an "aha!" moment of undeniable value, for free, that makes them sell themselves on your solution.
Instead of a simple Lead Form, test sending traffic to a dedicated landing page with a much stronger, more valuable offer:
- A valuable asset: Not a flimsy 2-page PDF, but a comprehensive guide, a webinar replay, a checklist, or a case study that directly addresses their nightmare. The people who take the time to download and consume this are far more qualified.
- A free tool: For a marketing agency, a free SEO audit tool. For a financial advisor, a retirement calculator. It solves a small part of their problem for free and proves your expertise. We do this ourselves by offering a free ad campaign audit.
- A multi-step form: If you must use a form, make it a journey. Ask qualifying questions first (e.g., "What's your biggest challenge with X?", "What's your company size?"). People who aren't serious will drop off. Those who complete it have invested time and thought, making them much more valuable. You can still use Facebook's Lead Form but add these custom questions.
This approach scares people because it will definitly reduce your lead volume and increase your initial CPL. But the leads you do get will be from people who have a real problem and see you as a potential solution, not just another ad they clicked on.
You'll need to restructure your campaigns
Now we can finally talk about the ads themselves. With a clear ICP and a strong offer, your campaign structure should be built around intent, not just broad lookalikes. Here’s how I would prioritise audiences, moving away from the ones that are causing you problems.
| Audience Tier | Audience Type | Description & Strategy | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| BoFu (Bottom of Funnel) |
High-Intent Retargeting |
People who viewed your new landing page, added a product to cart, or initiated checkout in the last 7-30 days. Exclude purchasers. This is your most valuable audience. |
Highest |
| MoFu (Middle of Funnel) |
General Engagement Retargeting |
People who visited your website, watched 50%+ of a video ad, or engaged with your FB/IG page in the last 30-90 days. A broader group to nurture. |
High |
| ToFu (Top of Funnel) |
High-Quality Lookalikes |
Create 1% Lookalikes based on your BEST customers (e.g., upload a list of purchasers or high-value clients), or from people who completed your new high-friction lead form. DO NOT use website visitors. |
Medium |
| ToFu (Top of Funnel) |
"Nightmare-Based" Interests |
Target interests directly related to the pain point. Target users of competitor tools, followers of industry gurus, readers of specific publications. This requires deep research, not just guessing broad interests. |
Medium |
| AVOID |
Low-Quality Lookalikes |
Lookalikes based on website visitors, page engagers, or other low-intent signals. This is likely the source of your current problem and should be paused immediately. |
Lowest |
You would create seperate campaigns for each stage of this funnel (ToFu, MoFu, BoFu). This structure allows you to speak to each audience differently and control your budget more effectively, allocating more spend to the audiences that prove to generate real customers, not just cheap clicks.
You probably should re-evaluate your metrics
This entire shift hinges on one final, critical piece: changing how you measure success. The reason you're stuck in this mess is because you're likely obsessed with a low Cost Per Lead (CPL). A low CPL feels good, but it's a vanity metric if 90% of those leads are worthless. The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?"
To answer that, you need to calculate your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Once you know what a customer is worth to you, you can work backwards to determine what you can reasonably pay to acquire them (your Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC) and, in turn, what you can pay for a qualified lead.
Interactive LTV & Target CPL Calculator
Play around with that calculator. You'll quickly see that a £5 lead that never converts is infinitely more expensive than a £250 lead that turns into a £10,000 customer. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of cheap, fake leads. When you know you can afford to pay £333 for a qualified lead, you stop caring about getting £2 unqualified ones.
This is the main advice I have for you:
To summarise, stopping the flow of fake leads isn't about a quick fix or a technical tool. It requires a strategic overhaul of your entire approach to advertising on Facebook. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:
| Action Item | Rationale | First Step |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Pause All Low-Intent Lookalike Audiences | These are the primary source of your low-quality traffic. They are optimised for volume, not value, and are actively harming your budget and data quality. | Go into your Ads Manager and immediately pause any ad sets targeting Lookalikes based on website visitors, page engagers, or other broad signals. |
| 2. Redefine Your ICP Around a "Nightmare" | Switching from demographic to psychographic targeting (pain points) makes your messaging and audience selection far more precise and effective. | Sit down and write a one-sentence description of the most urgent, expensive problem your ideal customer is facing right now. |
| 3. Create a High-Value, "Positive Friction" Offer | Replace your low-friction Lead Form with an offer that forces prospects to qualify themselves by investing a small amount of time or effort to get real value. | Design a landing page for a valuable downloadable asset (e.g., a detailed guide, a checklist) that solves a small piece of your ICP's nightmare. |
| 4. Restructure Campaigns into a ToFu/MoFu/BoFu Funnel | This allows you to target users based on their level of intent, using appropriate messaging and high-quality audience sources for each stage. | Build your first new campaign targeting a high-intent BoFu audience: people who have visited your new landing page in the last 14 days but haven't converted. |
| 5. Calculate Your LTV and Set New KPIs | Shift your primary success metric from Cost Per Lead (CPL) to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) as a percentage of your LTV. | Use the calculator in this letter to determine your LTV and your maximum affordable CPL for a *qualified* lead. Make this your new benchmark for success. |
I know this looks like a lot of work, and it is. It's a move away from the "set it and forget it" approach that so many fall for, and towards a more deliberate, strategic, and ultimately far more profitable way of using paid advertising. Implementing this kind of system, from customer research and offer creation to campaign structuring and optimisation, is where professional expertise can make a huge difference.
If you'd like to discuss how we could apply this framework specifically to your business, I'd be happy to schedule a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can go through your account together and map out a more detailed plan of action.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
