In today’s economic climate, performance marketing efficiency matters more than ever.
But all too often, a significant portion of ad spend gets wasted on fake clicks, traffic, and leads. This limits ROAS, contaminates conversion data, and warps analytics.
And the problem isn’t isolated to Google. Recent Lunio data revealed average invalid traffic (IVT) rates are even worse on social media platforms like Meta, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
Lunio was specifically designed to cut the problem off at the source – screening out junk traffic before it ever hits your website. Ultimately allowing you to deliver more revenue from every dollar you spend on paid media.
In this final instalment of our three-part Wasted Ad Spend Report series, Lunio’s Head of Demand Generation Leonardo Pizarro spoke to Lunio’s Sales Director, Daniel Higson, to unpack the ins and outs of how the platform detects and excludes invalid traffic.
During the session, Dan and Leonardo shared insights on:
- How Lunio works in 3 easy steps
- Key features within the Lunio dashboard
- Lunio’s multi channel protection in action
- How to start auditing your traffic
- How marketers can get as much value as possible from the platform.
Webinar Recording
Webinar Timestamps
- 00:00 – Intro
- 03:57 – Agenda
- 04:35 – How Lunio works in 3 easy steps
- 07:27 – Lunio product overview
- 14:50 – Analyse One, Protect All: Multi-channel IVT protection
- 17:40 – Channel-level protection
- 20:20 – How to leverage invalid traffic data
- 31:20 – Exploring the Lunio clicks log
- 36:20 – How to audit your paid traffic for IVT
- 36:40 – Q&A
End Wasted Spend With Lunio
Concentrate 100% of your budget on real buyers by automatically excluding fake traffic. Get a free 14-day audit to see how much you’re spending on IVT.
Lunio 2024 Wasted Ad Spend Report
The recording references Lunio’s 2024 Wasted Ad Spend report which is available to download for free, no-form fill required. Expect to learn:
- Average IVT rates across all major ad platforms
- IVT rates by industry, region, and company size
- Lost revenue opportunities due to IVT for 2023 & 2024
- Top 3 concerns affecting performance marketers in 2023
- Strategies to minimise wasted ad spend across all channels
- How to reduce your paid media carbon emissions
- And lots more!
Download the 2024 Wasted Ad Spend Report
How Lunio Works In 3 Simple Steps
Lunio helps marketers exclude IVT and improve the return on ad spend via the process below:
1. Analyse All Paid Traffic
Lunio captures all ad traffic data and assesses the validity of each click.
2. Filter Fake Clicks & Bad Data
Traffic determined to be invalid is instantly excluded on the channel it’s detected on. Data identifying the source of the invalid click is then used to populate cross-channel exclusion audiences to prevent it from skewing analytics and negatively impacting other campaigns.
3. Learn & Evolve
Lunio continually analyses post-click traffic behaviour and conversion data to refine audience targeting over time. Campaigns are optimised against real buyers with genuine conversion potential to maximise return on ad spend.
TL;DR – Key Takeaways
- Lunio is a performance marketing efficiency platform that eliminates wasted ad spend by excluding bots and fake users from paid media campaigns on all channels.
- Clicks can be logged as Legitimate, Suspicious, or Invalid. Clicks that come from known blacklisted IPs or exhibit multiple obvious signs of automated on-page behaviour (e.g. bouncing in less than a second or filling out forms faster than a human possibly could) are immediately marked as invalid and blocked from interacting with your ads again.
- In certain cases, it’s difficult to determine based on a single interaction whether the source is a bot or just an indecisive human being. And that’s where Lunio’s “suspicious” category comes into play. Lunio will then assess a few additional clicks from the same source until it has enough information to accurately categorise it as invalid or legitimate. This process virtually eliminates the risk of flagging real interactions as fraud.
- Over time, with Lunio protection legitimate click sources increase and invalid ones decrease. This creates a positive feedback loop where higher volumes of positive buying signals are sent back to ad platforms so they can optimise for higher quality traffic.
- Bot traffic is prevalent across all ad platforms. An example would be price scraping bots which tend to be very common during highly competitive periods such as Black Friday.
- “Fake users” can refer to spam leads and fake social media profiles. With the rise of AI image and language generation tools, fake user activity has become even more prevalent on social media.
- The most obvious signs of IVT and fake users in marketing analytics data are peaks in traffic with significantly lower than average conversion rates, and unexpectedly high cost-per-acquisition or cost-per-sale metrics.
- Lunio can help to significantly improve lead quality. Digital asset management platform Canto implemented Lunio to address issues with fake sign ups, which was limiting their ability to deliver predictable revenue growth. In the first two months, they increased their pipeline by £350,000.
- Another common outcome of using Lunio is a reduction in bounce rates and a significant uptick in session duration. If you commonly experience 90%+ bounces rates with an average session duration of <5 seconds, it warrants further investigation to determine how much invalid traffic is hitting your landing page.
- Invalid traffic rates can vary significantly from business to business. That’s why it’s important to establish a baseline figure. Lunio’s 14-day free audit monitors your paid traffic and shows you exactly what percentage of it is invalid, along with how much ad spend has been wasted.
- The business costs of IVT continue to stack up when you consider lost revenue opportunities. The return on ad spend for invalid clicks is always 0:1, which further stifles business growth. Lunio’s Wasted Ad Spend Report predicts $204bn in lost revenue opportunity for brands and advertisers in 2024.
- Lunio’s Placement Report shows the health of traffic coming from each individual placement within Google Display Network (GDN) campaigns. Those with high levels of IVT can either be excluded, or Lunio will continue to clean up the traffic coming from that source over time.
- You can use Lunio’s 100K Display Placement Exclusion List to remove the worst offending placements to give your GDN campaign performance and instant uplift.
- Lunio’s Keyword Report shows how much invalid traffic each individual keyword within your Google Ads account is generating. You can use this to eliminate low-performing keywords and identify areas for improvement.
- Major data discrepancies between CRM platforms and web analytics platforms commonly experienced by marketers are often the result of IVT. Lunio helps to reduce these discrepancies by preventing analytics platform data being skewed by IVT.
- Lunio’s Location Report shows which regions within your current targeting are generating the most invalid traffic. This can act as a confidence metre to cross-reference your ad platform analytics data against. It gives an indication of how much the numbers you’re seeing on your ad platform might be skewed for a particular location.
- Lunio Clicks Log shows each and every paid ad click, whether it’s valid, its location, and other relevant details. This gives complete transparency over data which most ad networks are no longer providing to advertisers.
- Lunio is fully GDPR and CPPA compliant. The only Personally Identifiable Information (PII) collected is IP addresses, which falls under legitimate interest specifically for fraud prevention purposes.
Useful Links & Further Reading
Download Lunio’s Wasted Ad Spend Report 2024
Download Lunio’s Performance Marketing Efficiency Playbook
Lunio’s 100k Display placement exclusion list
Watch Lunio’s IVT Webinar in Partnership w/ IAS & Scope3
Watch Lunio’s Technical Deep Dive Webinar on IVT
How Canto Accelerate Qualified Pipeline Generation with Lunio
How BiGDUG Drive Down Cost of Sale with Lunio
AbuseIPDB – IP address abuse reports
Lead Gen Fraud: How to Identify & Prevent Fake Leads, Lunio
End Wasted Spend With Lunio
Concentrate 100% of your budget on real buyers by automatically excluding fake traffic. Get a free 14-day audit to see how much you’re spending on IVT.
