Canto increases qualified pipeline generation by $350,00 in first two months

Canto provides digital asset management solutions to some of the world's most recognised brands. They implemented Lunio to address issues with lead quality, which was limiting their ability to build qualified pipeline and deliver predictable revenue growth.

Canto is a digital asset management solution with more than 2,500 customers, including Gymshark, LinkedIn, Columbia University, and more. They specialise in creating centralised content libraries that can be configured with unlimited custom fields and unique branding.

In mid 2022, Mandee Richards, Head of Marketing at Canto, started to notice a consistent pattern of suspicious conversion activity. At the same time each month, they had a spike in fake demo sign-ups stemming from paid search.

Not only was this costing the business money, it was also contaminating Canto’s analytics and making it hard to accurately report on performance and forecast revenue growth.

Mandee suspected bot traffic was contributing to the problem. And Canto’s marketing agency recommended using Lunio to analyse paid traffic data.

Eliminating fake traffic sources

After setting up Lunio’s tracking script, all clicks on Canto's paid search ads were analysed and 13.78% were logged as invalid.

After reviewing the clicks log, it became clear a lot of the invalid activity could be traced back to the misuse of a BrandVerity bot. BrandVerity is a competitor research and brand protection tool for paid search. It crawls paid ads to give visibility over competitor messaging and helps identify those who are running ads or landing pages they shouldn’t.

To assess the extent of the problem, Canto were advised to make changes to their campaigns to eliminate the influence of IP addresses associated with the BrandVerity bot. This resulted in invalid traffic dropping to 2.87% across paid search - a significant 79.17% reduction.

"Since making the changes Lunio recommended, the issues we were having with lead quality have improved massively. We generated more qualified pipeline in the two months after switching on traffic protection than we had done in the previous two years" said Mandee.

The results

With higher quality traffic, the revenue-boosting benefits became clear in Canto’s paid search performance. A rapid and significant increase in lead quality was the most noticeable change.

By the end of the first month, there was a huge increase in pipeline generated. With the wasted budget being reallocated to genuine users, the number of legitimate demo sign-ups increased.

• $350,000 increase in pipeline in first two months
• $67,400 saved in ad spend per month
• 79.17% invalid traffic reduction