Creating Competitive Advantages in Telecoms: Winning Subscribers by Optimising PPC Campaigns

Creating Competitive Advantages in Telecoms: Winning Subscribers by Optimising PPC Campaigns

Stopping invalid traffic in PPC campaigns can create competitive advantages for telcos. In a market that is laser-focused on capturing new subscribers and upselling services, every click has to count.

Fixed service providers, mobile service operators (MNOs), and mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) face intense competition for new subscribers. Optimising PPC campaigns can directly impact engagement with real consumers and, in turn, deliver real ROI.When a telco addresses undetected invalid traffic in its campaigns, it can reduce losses from ad fraud and reinvest recovered budget back into its Google Ads.

MNOs and MVNOs invest heavily in marketing but could be losing 20% or more of its PPC spend to invalid traffic. If a telco has a $50,000 PPC budget per month, it could be losing $10,000. More importantly, it is also losing opportunities to engage real users and convert them into subscribers.

In a market where thin margins are being eroded by over-the-top (OTT) players and subscriber growth is a key benchmark, stopping invalid traffic can be one of the fastest and simplest ways to improve a telco’s bottom line. Telcos have been investing in anti-fraud systems to stop revenue leakage from Voice Fraud for years but have yet to address invalid traffic and fraud in their marketing campaigns. The opportunity in campaign optimisation is massive and relatively straightforward compared to constantly evolving cyber threats on their networks.
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Visibility Creates Efficiency

Invalid traffic is any traffic that does not meet quality or completeness criteria or otherwise does not represent legitimate traffic that should be included in measurement counts. Among the reasons why traffic may be deemed invalid is it is a result of non-human traffic, or activity designed to produce invalid traffic like bots, hosts and malware.[1]

Other invalid traffic like non-genuine engagement and non-incremental engagement look at behaviour attributes and abnormal user behaviour. These could be abnormal levels of ad engagement from a single device across multiple campaigns or simply low click quality. For telcos, it is about gaining visibility into click traffic and understanding where the true value is. Otherwise, marketing metrics will be skewed and it will be difficult to get an accurate picture of PPC campaign results.
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For example, TrafficGuard examined an MVNO’s PPC traffic over a two-week period and found these results:

• 20% of its 40,000 clicks were invalid traffic
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• $20,000 of its $100,000 in ad spend was lost to invalid traffic
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• 50% of invalid traffic came from bots, hosts and malware
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• 20% of invalid traffic came from duplicate clicks
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A single customer clicked 44 times on an ad in 12 hours

An audit report was generated for the MVNO that gave it visibility into the scale of the problem and the opportunity in addressing it. The biggest takeaway was that 20% of its budget wasn’t just lost, the budget wasn’t working hard to meet marketing and business goals. The marketing team could see that its campaign metrics were not accurate, and that they needed more visibility into their PPC traffic.
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PPC Campaign Optimisation

Telcos need transparency into their traffic and the tools to address a complex problem. With the right platform, they will be able to gain clarity on all campaign attributes at the click level. They will be able to stop bot-driven traffic while using validation tools to cap clicks and have budget re-invested in engaging more users in real time. Automated traffic removal means marketing teams don’t need to allocate resource to traffic management or need technical skills to deliver new performance and accuracy in PPC campaigns.

It is all about activating budget that was previously wasted on invalid traffic. The outcomes for telcos are greater opportunities to engage, capture potential subscribers, and generate new revenue. They can compete with maximum budget utilisation and will see that campaign optimisation is a competitive advantage over other organisations that have yet to address the problem. At the same time, marketers can demonstrate greater value in their digital marketing while clearly showing that the results they’re deliver are real. It is a win-win from the C-suite through to marketing execs running campaigns.

If you’d like to learn more about how we’re supporting MNOs, MVNOs and a whole range of telcos, get in touch.

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