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Is this stupid? I’m trying to fight back bots on PMax.
Posted by on September 23, 2025 at 10:42 pmI’m working with a restaurant group. Different venues, same owner. They want Google Ads to drive reservations through TheFork. TheFork does not integrate with Google Ads, so we see traffic but not confirmed bookings, which fucks with attribution.
My plan is to send people to a lightweight landing page with a button for each venue. When they click, they go to that venue’s TheFork page, and I track that click as a conversion. Since Performance Max can attract bots, I’ll ask for a name and run reCAPTCHA before the redirect, then show a short thank you screen with a five second auto forward to TheFork. The conversion fires on that thank you page. We still can’t verify the final booking, but we can be much more confident that real people reached the booking flow.
I’m open to suggestions. What do you guys think?
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1 Reply
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Use the intermediate landing page with reCAPTCHA and fire conversions on the thank you redirect so you filter bots and still feed PMax cleaner signals even without final booking data.
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Totally get the struggle with bots messing up pmax stats, been there with multi-venue clients.
Try, 1) Send traffic to a lightweight landing with clear buttons per venue,2) Add reCAPTCHA + ask for a name to filter bots,
3) Fire conversion on a short thank you page that auto-forwards after 5 seconds.
As a simpler alternative, you could just track clicks to thefork as a proxy for interest, knowing it won’t be perfect.
I’ve done something similar for a small cafe chain and got much cleaner data without changing ad spend, happy to dm the landing template if you want. -
Can you pass url parameters to TheFork and then add that parameter to the order? Like a GCLID style offline conversion tracking.
I think your approach can still be enhanced, by storing the name & the GCLID on your landing page and if the user finishes the booking you can connect the GCLID to that person using the name. (Bit shaky but it depends on the volume of the orders) if you have 100s within an hour, this surely won’t work, but getting actual bookings 80% right is still better than not tracking the bookings at all).
We have developed similar systems, where we stored the GCLID in an interim DB and then connect it with the right conversion later on.
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I am curious.
Why Pmax?
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