How did we save a quarter of a million in advertising budget by eliminating fictitious traffic?
- Bluerank & Rainbow
Rainbow's campaigns are well optimised, and improvements require data-driven technology. We implemented the CHEQ Paradome artificial intelligence-based platform to eliminate bots and fake users (Invalid Traffic, IVT). By excluding worthless traffic, we immediately saw an improvement in the effectiveness of our advertising efforts. We achieved this without running an additional campaign - saving time and not increasing costs.
Project nominated in European Search Awards 2023 in category: Best use of data - PPC (Large)
Challenges
High number of Data Centres in Invalid Traffic reports
After launching the solution, we noticed that a large number of Data Centres pre-categorised as 'suspicious traffic' appeared in the IVT reports. Including such traffic in the analyses causes us to assess a false picture of the effectiveness of our operations.
Incoming traffic from territories other than those covered by the paid campaign
The reports recorded traffic from areas where Rainbow's offer is not available for purchase and which were not targeted in the advertising message. This traffic amounted to 12.7 % of the total traffic on the site. Such traffic warrants attention and is a signal that we may be dealing with bot impersonation of users.
Automatic analysis of frauds in multiple campaigns simultaneously
Rainbow runs many campaigns simultaneously, some of which are seasonal, which is specific to the travel industry. The challenge was to analyse IVT simultaneously in campaigns relating to the current offer and the future season. We therefore mapped and combined seasonality with unusual user behaviour, signalling automated visits.
Strategy and implementation
In Poland, in the travel category, the IVT rate in paid traffic is between 3-7%. The IVT analysis carried out for Rainbow showed that the level of fictitious traffic was around 4%. Taking into account the scale of spending on paid activities, the annual business loss due to bots/fictitious users was several hundred thousand. Taking into account the average ROAS and business loss, Rainbow was losing the opportunity through bots to generate additional revenue from the sale of additional tours to real consumers.
In addition, the incoming IVT traffic distorted the conversion funnel. This reduced revenue and negatively impacted campaign ROI. To solve the problem, we removed bot traffic from paid campaigns and reduced IVT by more than 50%. The long-term effect was to improve the real-time content of remarketing lists by removing fake and non-converting 'users'.
CHEQ Paradome is a cybersecurity solution for improving digital performance marketing activities. It allows you to identify bots and fake users and exclude their presence from your digital marketing activities, sales funnel process, analysis and forecasts.
The project using this tool is ongoing. Here, we refer to the results obtained in the first 12 months, from June 2022 to June 2023. Given the challenges we faced, we first tailored the solution to the realities of the Polish market, creating a 'white list' of tools used by Rainbow. As a result of an in-depth analysis and calibration, we confirmed the reliability of 50% of the Data Centres - the 'white list', while the rest were flagged as false and blocked. This provided us with a better traffic picture and more accurate paid traffic data.
We calibrated the solution so as not to block real users (Poles) who live outside the country. After deeper traffic analysis, we found that some users who accessed the site from non-targeted areas and declared their location as Poland were Poles living in other countries. We refined the solution so as not to block potential consumers.
The solution was integrated into all campaigns to automatically optimise traffic quality not only during the summer and winter seasons. Traffic optimisation took place automatically throughout the campaign.
Results
- Optimisation of the quality of paid traffic; as a result, fictitious traffic from paid channels was reduced by 72%,
- Over 250,000 PLN of advertising budget saved,
- Exclusion of fictitious users from remarketing lists: higher conversion rate and improved campaign visibility among real customers, increasing reach to a wider group of real online consumers (1.54% improvement).
I am very positively surprised by the results that Bluerank with CHEQ Paradome have achieved for Rainbow. We have improved the quality of traffic and ensured regular detection and mitigation of anomalies on R.pl
Piotr Wilk, Senior E-commerce Manager, Rainbow Tours SA