Overcoming Advertising Challenges in Sports Betting with TrafficGuard: From Targeting to Content

The nature of sportsbooks’ business means they face unparalleled challenges when it comes to digital advertising. The web of regulatory frameworks, data privacy laws, and platform restrictions - which aren’t consistent across different countries and territories - makes marketing strategy a minefield for the uninitiated.

One of the key challenges that emerge when we speak to our customers in the sector (and we’ve got the biggest names on our books, so it’s fair to say that we have a representative sample) is the effective use of inclusion and exclusion audience lists, or as Google refers to it, ‘personalised targeting’, to make sure digital campaigns are spending effectively, and are reaching their intended audience.  

Google’s policies around personalised targeting are unambiguous:

The consequences of this for sportsbook operators are that accurately targeting audiences - and consequently, making the most effective use of your advertising budget - becomes a bit (or rather, a lot) more complicated than in other industries. 

An inability to manage these constraints effectively can result in wasted ad spend on returning users, and your ads reaching unqualified and irrelevant audiences, which in turn drives up acquisition costs and reduces overall campaign efficiency. 

That’s the problem. The good news is that we’ve got the solution. TrafficGuard works with the biggest names in the global sports betting market to safeguard their digital advertising investment and drive significant market growth. 

In short: we know a thing or two about navigating this tricky regulatory landscape, and to be clear about that: what TrafficGuard offers is by no means a loophole or a way of bypassing the law, it is a strictly above-board way of validating your audience’s click behaviours and making the most of your advertising budget. 

‍

“TrafficGuard's meticulous validation impressed us, uncovering diverse 'bot' traffic. Not just basic human-mimicking bots, but even those targeting sign-up bonuses. Their advanced tool flagged 43%+ PPC funnel invalid traffic, surpassing competitors.”
- William Hill

‍

In this blog, we’ll explore the challenges of audience personalisation in sports betting and demonstrate how TrafficGuard’s technology can support you to unlock the full potential of your digital ad budget.

‍

The Challenges of Inclusion and Exclusion Lists in Sportsbetting

In most industries, inclusion and exclusion lists are straightforward: they allow advertisers to fine-tune their targeting, ensuring campaigns reach the most relevant users. 

For sportsbooks, however, these tools are largely unavailable, due to the aforementioned regulatory frameworks and platform restrictions; leaving even the most experienced marketers with only a blunt and unfocused approach to audience segmentation. 

Regulations in regions like the UK and Australia require sportsbooks to ensure that gambling ads don’t reach minors or users in restricted locations, which limits the collection of available behavioural data and narrows the scope of permissible targeting. 

Before you’ve even launched a campaign, you’re operating with one hand tied behind your back, and that’s before we even get on to specific platform policies.

Major advertising platforms like Google and Bing restrict behavioural targeting for gambling-related campaigns, prohibiting advertisers from creating lists based on user engagement or prior interactions. Consequently, campaigns often rely on broader, unfocused targeting strategies; exposing ads to a mix of unqualified and already-engaged audiences. 

This lack of precision compounds the challenges already posed by regional data privacy laws, such as GDPR and CCPA, which prevent the tracking of detailed user activity across platforms.

Taken as a whole, these constraints create a restrictive environment where sportsbooks can’t exclude returning navigational traffic, or precisely target prospective customers. This systemic inefficiency results in misaligned ad spend that fails to optimise campaign performance. Without adequate ad verification systems, this further increases the risk of invalid traffic inflating advertising costs.

‍

How Inclusion and Exclusion List Challenges Impact Campaign Efficiency

The absence of inclusion and exclusion lists not only limits precision but also introduces layers of inefficiencies that become particularly pronounced in the sports betting industry. For example, without effective exclusion mechanisms, campaigns could be repeatedly targeting existing users who have already signed up or made a deposit.

Sportsbooks in particular are in a tricky position when it comes to brand campaigns. The highly competitive nature of the industry, and the large amounts spent on digital ads, means that not bidding on your brand is simply not an option; but doing so leaves operators vulnerable to returning navigational traffic - essentially users repeatedly navigating to their website via expensive PPC placements rather than through organic searches.

These returning users are unlikely to engage further through acquisition ads, yet they contribute to higher campaign costs by consuming the budget through impressions and clicks.

In the example below, we can see a user who is hyper-engaged with the sportsbook’s website - using PPC placements to access the site 178 times in only six days

TrafficGuard’s technology gives the operator granular insight into user’s behaviour, enabling them to add these hyper-engaged users to an exclusion list - which gives the operator confidence that the user will still return to the site, just using an organic way to navigate to it, rather than via the expensive brand campaign.

Below we can see an example of a user’s behaviour, before and after they were added to an exclusion list, and the difference is clear:

Lowering your CPA

Another consequence of Google's limitations is the increased cost-per-acquisition or CPA. Each ad interaction from a returning user makes a dent in the total campaign budget without delivering any incremental value. 

As if that wasn’t bad enough, this inefficiency is further exacerbated by the inability to block unqualified audiences for gambling-related ads (due to the unavailability of inclusion/exclusion lists), which means that campaigns often reach users outside permitted regions or those who fall below the legal gambling age. This dilutes the effectiveness of ad spend, as these impressions fail to convert and only serve to drive up overall costs. Let’s not forget that the costs of new user acquisition in the sports betting industry are already way above average - in some regions it can be as high as $750. 

Invalid traffic, such as bots or fraudulent clicks, exacerbates this problem by draining budgets and reducing the overall efficiency of campaigns. Without effective ad fraud detection mechanisms, sportsbooks will struggle to distinguish genuine user engagement from low-quality traffic, and can’t effectively allocate budgets to those high-value users that they really want to target ie: those most likely to convert.

This lack of audience granularity leaves advertisers in a cycle of inefficiency and unconstrained spending; unable to optimise their campaigns for growth on the one hand, and being bound by regulatory constraints on the other.

There is some good news, however. 

TrafficGuard’s Custom Click Level Frequency Controls 

TrafficGuard’s technology goes straight to the heart of these inefficiencies by leveraging dynamic filtering and automated validation rules to ensure that campaigns target the ‘right’ users while adhering to the strict regulatory and platform constraints of whichever jurisdiction the sportsbook is operating in.

We’ll explore in detail how the technology functions in practice, but first, you should understand the impact of returning navigational traffic on your customer acquisition costs: introducing Aaron…

Read: CS Insights: Returning Users, How Paid Ads for Repeat Logins Impact CAC

Our proprietary technology uses clickstream data to identify patterns of engagement that differentiate high-value users from low-value traffic. For instance, it flags redundant or invalid traffic by tracking user interactions and highlighting users who repeatedly click on ads without meaningful engagement, driving up your CPC and your overall CAC. In an industry where competition for new users is fierce, and the cost-per-acquisition is already well above average as a result, this is a game-changer for the savvy sportsbook. 

Once you’ve categorised your traffic by click behaviour, TrafficGuard employs dynamic filtering to segment it at a granular level. Returning users who have already converted, are automatically routed to Shadow Campaigns to ensure that already-acquired customers are managed effectively through the user journey so as not to impact budgets by clicking on PPC placements. 

They are an ideal solution for operators who are concerned about losing their place in the highly competitive ad auction marketplace (as we’ve said - not bidding on your brand simply isn’t an option for sportsbooks) but need to mitigate the high costs associated with returning navigational traffic. 

There’s more on Shadow Campaigns here, but essentially these function as duplicates of your existing PPC campaigns but operate at a much lower cost-per-click (CPC), allowing you to mitigate the impact of returning traffic and ensure your budget is only targeted towards traffic that has been designated as likely to convert. 

‍

Our dashboard gives you complete control over how many times a user can click before being directed to a shadow campaign via custom click frequency rules - here’s Aaron again:

Read: TrafficGuard's Click Frequency Rules and Shadow Campaigns for Sports Betting Operators

This strategy ensures that high-value primary campaigns are preserved for new prospects while redundant traffic is handled more cost-effectively. By setting custom thresholds for click frequency, advertisers can balance engagement with efficiency, redirecting excessive clicks from the same user to shadow campaigns without disrupting their broader targeting strategy.

The platform also integrates advanced validation rules to comply with regulatory and platform requirements. These rules filter by location and VPN usage to ensure that only eligible users are targeted. For example, geofencing ensures that ads are served exclusively to users in approved jurisdictions. These safeguards not only reduce inefficiencies but also protect sportsbooks from potential regulatory penalties. Ad verification mechanisms ensure that all traffic meets the required standards, further enhancing the effectiveness of campaigns.

‍

Case Study: Applying Shadow Campaigns in Sports Betting

To illustrate the impact of TrafficGuard’s shadow campaigns, consider a sportsbook running acquisition campaigns for a major sporting event. Without TrafficGuard, the campaign would suffer from inefficiencies such as repeated clicks from existing users (and subsequent inflated CPCs), and impressions served to users outside approved regions. These inefficiencies increase the overall CPA and dilute the campaign’s effectiveness.

In this customer's case, a leading European sportsbook, TrafficGuard was able to identify that 43% of its budget was being lost to invalid traffic, primarily from existing customers using branded keywords to access the site.

After utilising TrafficGuard’s technology, the operator achieved a 42.4% reduction in the average CPC, lowering it from €246 to €141. 

Furthermore, the sportsbook reported a 12x return on investment (ROI) on TrafficGuard fees, demonstrating the value of robust click fraud protection and ad verification protocols.

TrafficGuard offers a sophisticated solution to the limitations imposed by limitations imposed by inclusion and exclusion list restrictions. By leveraging dynamic filtering and automated compliance checks to optimise targeting and reduce costs. By addressing these challenges head-on, TrafficGuard empowers sportsbooks to navigate a restrictive advertising environment while achieving sustainable growth.

Request a free demo today and discover how TrafficGuard can optimise your advertising strategy while staying on the right side of regulatory compliance.

‍