Ad fraud is no longer just a B2C issue. According to a recent report from MarTech, B2B marketers are increasingly seeing their lead generation efforts undermined by fraudulent activity. Fake leads, bot traffic, and spoofed domains are siphoning off budget and skewing performance metrics, particularly on paid platforms like LinkedIn and Google.
The core issue? Fraudsters exploit B2B’s reliance on form fills and content downloads, making it difficult to validate the quality of leads. This can create:
- Wasted ad spend
- Strained sales relationships
- Inaccurate ROI assessments
To mitigate the risk, marketers are advised to adopt stronger funnel protections, including:
- Removing non-essential form fields
- Monitoring for spam indicators such as suspicious email formats or generic company names
- Verifying job titles and company details before passing leads to sales
- Using lead scoring models that prioritize behavioral signals over simple form completions
- Vetting third-party lead vendors carefully
- Asking platforms direct questions about traffic sources and audience integrity
B2B advertisers are urged to stay vigilant and treat ad fraud prevention as a core part of their media strategy—not a reactive measure.
For much more information and strategies for combating fraud, please see the full article at MarTech, “Ad fraud is hitting B2B where it hurts: lead gen”