We've been struggling with performance max campaigns, delivering photo traffic bots, quick forms. Then I have really good news shocked to be honest with you that Google rolled out, but that's not necessarily a honeypot this little fly trap. This shocks me. If you really start to think about the strategy that would need to be applied, this is a catastrophic error. We've been struggling with performance max campaigns, delivering photo traffic bots, quick forms. Then I have really good news that I'm actually excited about and shocked to be honest with you, that Google rolled out. However, before I get into the meat and potatoes of it, I'd like to say that I don't think this is a silver bullet. I still think we're gonna be dealing with quite a bit in the wave of relevant traffic. And it's because performance max is so. Reliant on display. And I think that a lot of this traffic is coming from display. I think that it's coming in a way that Google's not able to block or see. And I don't really know what that means from a technical perspective. I don't know if they're using proxy servers but for whatever reason, a lot of the ClickFORM traffic that we're seeing is hurtling. Other fences that we're putting up to with that said, Google just gave us a really great tool that I've seen work really well with other campaigns. So inside a performance match, you're gonna go to settings. You're gonna scroll down to location, setting. Soon as he gives it to me. So under campaign settings, we have locations and then under the location selection, you're gonna see location options, target presence, or interest people in regularly in, or who've shown interest in your target locations. This is a catastrophic error and that's not me being dramatic. By the way, we've seen this be a catastrophic error. Campaign types for years. When we were running real estate investment leads, I can't begin to tell you how often I would look at an account that was actually really well structured, but it wasn't performing as well as it could have. And when I opened it up, it was always this setting that was killing it because somebody who's in Miami is very different than somebody who's shown interest in Miami. Whole lot of people are interested in Miami that aren't in Miami and that's true. Every city, especially every major MSA. So what you wanna do is toggle down to people in or regularly in your targeted location. Couple of comments here, the first one is notice what Google says is recommended. This shocks me. If you really start to think about the strategy that would need to be applied in order to determine which of these two targets you're choosing would have to specific to the business and the goal. How on earth can you offer a recommendation without knowing the business or the goal? This is a really good example of where Google softly stated where Google overreaches. And then what's interesting is. They go on to kind of explain by default, your ads can show to people in regularly or who've shown interest in your targeted location. So that's default setting for performance max. And then they explain why. And then here we are, alternatively, you can use other location options to limit the location types you target. I think this is gonna be a massive help when it comes to irrelevant traffic because some of the traffic that we're sitting inside performance max, especially for lead gen campaigns. Producing what looks to be viable prospects and actually have another video on this that talks about how I don't wanna call it bot traffic, but we'll just say fraudulent traffic is way bigger problem than we thought it was. And I've never seen this inside a Google pre-performance max, not to say I haven't seen fraudulent traffic just to say that I haven't seen it to this extreme. It was unbelievable. We were actually really excited. We're running these, these lead generation campaigns. The first one was for us, cause we were te testing it on our own account internally and it was raining. It was amazing and they looked real, real names. John Smith, John dot Smith, 21 gmail.com with a phone number, but then Mr. Smith never engages, never returns a phone call, or if he answers his phone, never remembers filling out the form. It's weirdest thing that I still don't understand in the video that I'll link to. I talk about how these click farms appear to be spoofing. Real traffic in order to game Google ad sense. And then there were some people in the description of the video that actually had some, even better ideas than what I had. You might say, well, the why isn't important. And I'm gonna respond to that by saying maybe it is because maybe you can fence around it with settings like this one. So one of the things that I think is gonna help us is letting Google know. We only want people inside of this targeted geography instead of allowing Google to go out and reach for us. This isn't as big a deal for eCommerce as it is for lead generation because free eCommerce. there's a gate that has a monetizable event, which means if somebody buys from you, who cares where they are, they can be in Timbuk two that gave you money. I realize that there's limits to that too, based off of shipping and fulfillment, but what I'm saying? Like, somebody in Timbuk two is not gonna buy from you if you're only offering us or north American or European fulfillment. It just occurred to me that I don't know where Tim book two is. So maybe it is doesn't matter. Lead generation has gates that are easy to hurdle. So one of the things that we've been telling everybody is make your gates less Hable. And so one of the highest performing lead generation campaigns we have in set up performance, max has 17 form fields. What's frustrating is that alone. Hasn't solved all of our problems. My buddy, Ralph Burns at tier 11 has a campaign that has 15 form fields inside a performance max, and they're still getting full conversions. So the COFO conversions. it's not something that you can fix in its entirety. Don't talk to me about click fraud software, because I, I can tell you that we've tried it and it doesn't work. But I do think that setting up the guardrails, like we're setting up here instead of performance max, where we tell Google, Hey, we only want traffic actually coming from the specific geographic regions that we're targeting. I think this is gonna be really helpful. It just frustrates me, look at how well this is hidden. Y'all look at how well this is hidden. Like you have to go into settings. That's fine. You have to scroll down specifically to the campaign settings. I'm surprised it's not in additional settings actually. And then we have to open location and then we have to choose our location and we have to open application options. And then we have to be smart enough to hurdle Google's recommended option and choose people in a regularly in your targeted location. I think it's absolutely shocking that Google thinks that they know so much better than us. I'd be really interested too, to know anybody who doesn't have this setting inside of their campaign. I'm inside of a PMAX campaign that I don't think we ever ran this, or if we did, we didn't run it for very long. And which means no, we ran it for a little bit. But if they're giving my old paused campaigns, the feature set, then I have to imagine they're gonna prioritize campaigns that are actually being utilized. This is not a glitch. 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So let me know in the comments, if you don't have this a B, the other thing that I'd be really interested in working with everybody on is let me know when you choose to toggle the setting and you run a lead generation campaign, if this solves the problem. And if it does, it means a couple of things. The first one is it means that Google was intentionally delivering that traffic based off of its user engagement. And if Google was delivering the traffic based off of user engagement, it gives us a sense as to how performance max is working. It actually gives us really significant insight into how performance max is working. We know that it's goal driven, but that would mean that it's predictive in its goal which kind of helps equip us in terms of how we deal with it in the future. And then we also know that Google's gonna go where the traffic is cheap. and that's not something that I've hopped on too much, but it's a soapbox. I'm gonna start jumping on more and more with performance. Max, Google is trying to maximize the value of its own inventory. That is a soapbox. I've jumped on a lot, but what that means among many other things is Google's gonna go where the traffic is cheapest. And that doesn't mean cheapest for you. That means that Google has a bunch of traffic, that it can't sell to anybody that's trying to monetize. And so if it finds traffic that it's able to sell to you, that suddenly becomes monetizable. There's our Timbuk two lead generat. Prospect now. And so what that means is the more fo traffic for fo conversions, you get the more foe conversions you're going to get. part of me, this is bold maybe, but part of me wants to block non-essential locations on a server side level entire. maybe that's not that bold. Maybe that's just the thing that we're supposed to be doing. Like if you only sell to north America, and I know that there are some issues here and there's quite a few depending on what your staffing looks like. But why would you allow traffic from any other location I'd be interested in other people's stress test. Please for me. And let me know if you have reasons that's violently flawed. I know for a fact that would hurt organic. So if you're relying really heavily on organic traffic, then Google doesn't like it when we dictate who can and cannot see content. But if you're not relying on organic traffic, that's a good way. I think, to help kind of put up these guard rails too, and I'll think through some other issues that we might run into in, in deploying a strategy like that. But the more full conversions you're go. You get the more full conversions you're probably going to get, because Google's gonna try to replicate success in this particular instance, you've pro you've proven success. The other thing that I'd recommend doing this is an idea I came up with on one of our YouTube lives actually is create honey pots in your conversion form. I'll give an example. So here's our conversion form and it's actually, it's two part and it's long form. So here's the solutions eight conversion form. Now, if I wanted to create a honey pot for click forms, remember these aren't necessarily bots they're click forms. First name, I need phone number. I need address website budget. You've probably already heard me talk a little bit about this. If you select less than $5,000, we don't work with client. We actually don't work with clients less than $10,000 on unless they're in our incubator program, but the less than 5,000 goes to a separate thank you page. And I don't count that as a conversion. Which is a pro tip, by the way, you don't have to count things as conversions, if they're not valuable to you. So let Google know what's actually valuable to you so it can replicate successes, but that's not necessarily a honey pot, as much as it is a decision tree. And it's not something that's gonna help guard against click farms. Per se, because we're not necessarily sure where a click farm would land here, but. what you might wanna do is have an option here. Like, how did you hear about us drop down? That's preselected and, and I'm not saying you, how did you hear about us? I just mean pay attention to this dropdown on my computer. Have an option here. That's preselected that the pre selection is something that no viable lead would actually select. So for instance, what I might say here is what's the status of your Google ads? And the first option is I don't want to run Google ads. The second option is I have an active Google ads account that the third option is I don't have a Google ads account and I need you to create one. For me, I'm suspended. I create a bunch of options that a real lead is gonna choose something other than the, I don't wanna run Google ads because if you're taking the time to fill out this form, and I'm kind of coming up with this on the fly too. So maybe this isn't the best example, but it's good enough to get you to where I'm going. If you're taking the time to fill out the form, this little fly trap M makes the first option. Something that a reasonable logical human would look at and be like, oh, well, that's not true. But if it's pre-selected again, that's the key, and I'm a click form person. I'm gonna look at this and think like, oh, okay, well, thank you. You've I'm with the radio buttons, you're just gonna pick whatever. And I'm, you're not necessarily gonna pick the first one either, unless you're tapping. But with a dropdown, if it's already pre-selected, you're gonna keep going. That's not a full-proof plan, but it's a damn good one. It's a damn good one. I bet you that weeds out 60, 70% of them, especially if you make this multi variance on your form, you have 17 fields and you have two flight traps and that gives you the ability to let somebody off the hook if you wanted to if they missed one, but filtered everybody that captures two and If they get caught in the fly trap, that leads to a thank you page. That's not counted as a conversion. So what you just did there is you put performance max in a position to actually see who the real valuable leads are on the front end. Instead of having to do like offline conversion tracking and importing prospects, which could work on a long enough timeline, but not all of us have that timeline. So that's the idea. How did I do. I think I did. Okay. Would be really interested to see what y'all are seeing. And y'all when I ask for that, by the way, I'm not just asking you to comment so I can game YouTube, although that's part of it. This is new. And so the data that you provide me is actually really relevant and I appreciate y'all's engagement and input. Light comment, subscribe. Let's see tomorrow. So since we started running performance, max, we've encountered something that is really alarming and it's nothing. I don't think it's anything new. I think it's something that we just never knew existed. It's always been here would be my theory.