A clinic owner WhatsApped me a screenshot. "All these leads are fake. Look at the numbers."
The list had 14 leads. Three had hung up on the call. Two had answered and asked about a different treatment. One was a tyre kicker. Eight had been called once, did not pick up, and were marked junk.
Of the 14, maybe 2 were actually fake. The other 12 had been failed by the qualifier, not by the campaign.
What "fake" usually means inside a Dubai clinic
In the data, fake almost always means one of these:
- Did not pick up on the first call.
- Asked a question that was not about the headline service.
- Asked for a price the clinic did not want to give.
- Wanted the service in a different area or week.
None of those are fake leads. They are uncomfortable leads.
Why this matters for Google Ads in the UAE
If your clinic uploads "junk" status back to Google Ads as a negative signal, Smart Bidding learns from it. It quietly stops bidding on the keywords, hours and devices that produced those leads.
If half of the "junk" leads were actually real but uncomfortable, you have just trained the algorithm to hide your clinic from the patients who behave that way. Then you ask why bookings have dropped, even though your "lead quality" looks better in the spreadsheet.
The qualifier matters more than the campaign
We work with two clinics that run the same campaign with the same offer in the same auction. One closes 8 percent of leads. The other closes 25 percent. The campaign is identical. The receptionist is not.
Before you tell the agency the leads are fake, ask three questions of the sales side:
- Did we attempt the call at least 3 times across different times of day?
- Did we send a WhatsApp follow-up if the call did not connect?
- Did we handle the "what about service X" question, or did we steer the patient straight back to the headline offer?
Most "fake" leads do not survive those three questions.
When the leads are genuinely fake
There are real cases. Phone numbers that do not exist. Form fills from outside the UAE. Repeat submissions from the same IP. These should be tagged and uploaded to Google Ads as negative offline conversions so Smart Bidding learns.
The point is to be precise. Tagging a lead as junk because the receptionist did not enjoy the call is not the same as tagging a lead as junk because the phone number was 1234567.
The point
The fastest way for a Dubai clinic to ruin its Google Ads account is to mark uncomfortable leads as fake. Smart Bidding believes you. It will give you fewer of those leads. The bookings will drop. The "fake" leads were probably your real patients all along.
Written by Youssef Hajri, Founder of Access One. Access One is the first Healthcare Google Partner in the UAE. We run Google Ads for clinics, home healthcare and salons in Dubai. Get in touch.