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Your instinct is right. Optimizing for a page view as a “conversion” tells Google to find the cheapest possible traffic that will load that page, which is the opposite of what you want from an awareness campaign. The algorithm doesn’t know “engaged user” vs “fast scroller who happens to land on the page,” it just knows the event fired.
What awareness campaigns should optimize for instead. If you genuinely want awareness (top of funnel reach), use brand awareness or reach as the objective and don’t try to track it as a conversion. If you want signal that traffic is engaged, optimize for a longer engagement event like 30-second-on-page, scroll past 50%, or 2-page-session. Those filter out drive-by clicks better than a raw page view.
The “filter out bots” framing is also weird. Bots can fire page view events same as humans. Real bot filtering happens at the IP and behaviour level, not at the conversion event level. If their concern is bot traffic, that needs a Cloudflare or reCAPTCHA layer, not a page view conversion.
Push back on this. Page-view conversions inflate the conversion column and let the agency point at a number, but you’re paying for empty traffic.
