The hidden cost of bot leads in enrollment marketing

Today’s digital landscape is always evolving for graduate and adult-serving program enrollment marketers. It’s challenging to keep up with the new channels you should be advertising on, figure out how to generate more organic traffic through SEO, and navigate constantly changing privacy trends and laws. On top of that, marketers must combat an increasing amount of bot activity that is eroding campaign effectiveness and compromising lead quality metrics.

Here are some important things to know about bot-created graduate and adult leads, and what to do about them.

What are bot leads, and how prevalent are they?

Bot leads are fake leads deployed as part of lead generation fraud. They are often sophisticated enough to click on ads and even fill out your website’s lead generation forms. These leads could be completely made up, or they could be using the information of a real person in a lead gen form to pass the smell test and further go undetected. There is money to be made in this practice. Bot-created sites can appear to funnel a large amount of traffic to a specific website and get paid to do so, since they may appear to be official website affiliates. If bots are clicking on ads, they can drive up those ads’ clickthrough rates. In exchange, ad platforms may pay the bot source a small percentage of their profit without knowing there’s fraud involved.

How does bot activity impact graduate and adult program lead generation?

Bot leads can drive up your ad costs by artificially inflating your clickthrough rate (CTR) when bots click on your advertisements. Ad providers can then charge more for each impacted advertisement. And if you’re testing multiple messages or images within your ads, click bots can skew test results, causing you to spend money in the wrong places.

Because bot leads will never convert, they just drive up lead volume while your application and deposit numbers remain steady. It’s then up to you to discern which of your lead sources are actually performing well and which are being influenced by fake leads. In addition, your overall lead to deposit conversion rate looks very low, which may not reflect the work you and your team have put into sourcing leads for your institution.

Unlock proven strategies to protect and grow your enrollment funnel

Finally, bot leads are complex and resource-intensive to detect and eliminate if your team takes on the task of sorting through all your leads. It stretches typically small graduate enrollment teams thin – not to mention, it wastes valuable time you could be using to nurture legitimate potential students.

How can you protect yourself from the effects of bot leads?

Despite the headaches that bots can cause, there are steps you can take to mitigate their influence:

• Monitor your CTR and conversion rates regularly: By keeping an eye on each lead source, you can quickly spot unusual activity and investigate potential bot involvement.
• Use tools to detect and weed out bots: Implement solutions such as honeypot links (stealth links that only bots would click), programs that detect rapid click speeds, or reCAPTCHA puzzles to identify fraudulent activity.
• Diversify your lead sources: Relying on multiple sources reduces your dependency on any one channel, helping mitigate the effects of fraudulent leads.

These measures are critical in today’s digital marketing landscape, where trends like privacy laws and AI are reshaping the way schools approach lead generation. For example, regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) add complexity by requiring stricter data handling practices, which intersect with bot prevention strategies. On the other hand, AI is emerging as a powerful tool to combat ad fraud and improve ad targeting, helping institutions filter out invalid activity more efficiently while optimizing campaigns.

Ultimately, enacting these defenses alone can be challenging for smaller teams. Partnering with organizations experienced in fraud detection and prevention, like EAB, can help you implement effective measures and focus on nurturing high-intent leads.

Beyond bots: Tackling other lead quality challenges

Of course, bot leads are not the only “bad” leads you’ll come across – whether you’re getting leads from individuals who are too young for your graduate programs or are looking for a different type of degree, it’s frustrating when even the real leads are unusable.

EAB’s Appily Advance mitigates this issue by confirming student interest before delivering a list of curated leads to partners. Appily’s high-intent and pre-vetted leads help enrollment teams fill their classes with quality leads that are 33% more likely to respond than their existing inquiry pools. With assurance that your leads are legitimate, your team’s time can be spent cultivating relationships with prospects, rather than weeding out bad leads.