The World Cup Stress Test TrafficGuard
deposits once and never comes back. Immediately after the tournament, that isn't necessarily visible in the headline numbers. What matters is how many of those players stick around and whether their lifetime value justifies what you paid to acquire them.
Google and other major platforms invest heavily in preventing fraudulent traffic. Why does invalid traffic remain a problem?
I would compare it with programmatic advertising. Nobody would buy through a DSP without third-party verification in place. It is simply considered best practice. We're not saying the platforms themselves are fraudulent or deliberately generating invalid traffic. But everybody accepts that fraudulent and invalid traffic exists.
If you're an advertiser buying traffic, ultimately you're buying revenue. It makes sense to have an independent verification partner whose sole remit is to verify what you're buying and give you the ability to prevent waste.
Publishers and platforms will rightly say they're investing in tackling the problem, but this isn't necessarily the one thing they wake up every morning thinking about. We sit between the advertiser and the channel to provide that transparency and verification.
Are the biggest-spending operators the most exposed?
Te more you spend, the more you're exposed, simply because there is more opportunity for budget to be wasted. Two per cent of $1,000 might be considered a cost of doing business. Two or three per cent of $10m is extremely material. It’s money that could otherwise have become working media budget and generated a return. Tere are also differences between markets and verticals. Promotions and bonuses, for example, can attract bot traffic, so operators running those campaigns can be particularly susceptible. Tere is further issue around returning customers. As an operator gains market share and a market becomes saturated, you have to ask whether another 10 or 20 per cent increase in spend is reaching 10 or 20 per cent more new users, or whether you're simply reaching the same users more frequently. At some point you hit diminishing returns.
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Is the invalid traffic problem getting worse?
Tere are probably three things happening simultaneously. First, invalid traffic has always existed. Historically it was often accepted as a cost of doing business, whereas marketers are now paying much more attention to it.
Second, platforms have increasingly moved towards smart bidding. You give the platform more control over optimisation because it has enormous amounts of data, but the quid pro quo is that you have less transparency. Marketers are therefore saying: I'll use smart bidding, but I still want to understand the incrementality of every click. Tird, the internet itself is becoming increasingly automated and bots are becoming much more sophisticated.
Historically, most bot traffic would identify itself in one way or another. Now bots can come through an ad and interact with a site in ways that look remarkably similar to a legitimate user. Detecting them can involve analysing things such as mouse movements, form filling and device IDs. It is a cat-and-mouse game. Bot sophistication increases and detection technology has to become more sophisticated alongside it. It is an arms race.
Is the World Cup an exceptional case, or should operators be applying these lessons throughout the football season?
It's an always-on opportunity. Te level rises and falls with spend and major events, but inefficient spend exists on a month-to-month and annualised basis. Marketing teams spend days and weeks optimising creative, bid prices, partnerships, landing pages and the rest of the funnel to
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