Protect Your Ad Budget from Navigational Traffic from Existing Users

Key Highlights

• Customers navigating to your site via PPC placements are depleting your Google Ads budget.
• It’s important to find and remove this unwanted traffic to save money.
• iGaming operators face this challenge because users they have already acquired tend to exhibit more frequent repeat login behaviours.
• TrafficGuard offers a smart solution that works in real time to fix this problem.
  
  

Navigational Traffic: a Threat to Your PPC Campaign?

PPC ads are a quick route to new customers for many businesses. What’s often overlooked though, is the hidden cost of navigational traffic, which if not addressed can slowly and steadily drain your Google Ads budget.

Many of your genuine users, especially your loyal customers, will be using your paid ad placements - rather than organic search results or bookmarks - to navigate to your site; meaning you are paying for clicks from people who already know about your brand. 

In a competitive market like sports betting where every dollar of your ad budget matters, these clicks will have a detrimental impact on your growth - not to mention on your bottom line. 

Comprehensive click fraud detection and prevention from platforms like TrafficGuard will help mitigate the multiple threats your PPC campaigns face from both intentional and unintentional forms of invalid traffic. 

Understanding the impact that navigational traffic has on your PPC campaigns is the first step towards addressing it: TrafficGuard can help you do the rest. 

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Brand Campaigns Most Impacted by Rising Costs in Sports Betting

As sports betting operators invest more heavily in brand campaigns across various channels, including sports advertising, TV, and radio, they face increasing pressures to maintain visibility and secure market share. This heightened investment means operators must bid on their own brand names in search results to prevent competitors from intercepting potential customers during their online journeys.

Navigational traffic becomes a double-edged sword in this scenario. While brand campaigns are essential for driving awareness and recognition, they inadvertently lead to increased costs for clicks from existing customers—those who are already familiar with the brand. In this competitive landscape, operators are not only paying for new customer acquisition but also for repeat visits from loyal users, which can significantly inflate their advertising expenses.

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Navigational Traffic: How is it Costing Sportsbooks?

The impact of navigational traffic can be particularly costly for operators in the sports betting sector. The cost of new customer acquisition (CAC) is already high - $370 on average - and brand loyalty is low, so operators must be laser-focused on efficient use of ad budget and ensuring that every click counts. 

With the industry estimated to spend in excess of $2.3bn per year on Google ads, if an operator doesn’t have complete visibility over its ad traffic, it could be losing out on millions of users who are already engaged customers. 

One TrafficGuard sportsbook customer saw 97% of its spend being drained by existing customers using branded keywords to navigate to its website; an ad budget that otherwise would have been spent on converting new customers. 

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The TrafficGuard Solution

Custom rules and shadow campaigns

TrafficGuard’s sophisticated, traffic monitoring solution includes custom validation rules and shadow campaigns; proprietary tools to mitigate the impact of navigational traffic on your ad budgets. 

Custom validation rules allow you to limit the number of times a user can click on your paid campaigns. Once the threshold is reached, the user will only see your organic listings, which helps prevent rising CPC.

Shadow campaigns enable you to nurture highly engaged users who are restricted from accessing your paid campaigns under custom validation rules. Instead of pushing them directly to organic search results, where competitors may dominate the top positions, you can redirect these users to a duplicate of the original campaign designed specifically for this purpose, at a lower cost. This approach allows you to maintain a level of personalisation in your targeting while effectively keeping customer acquisition costs down.

With TrafficGuard on your side, you can unlock new levels of traffic visibility and control over your ad budgets. 

Learn more about our solutions to tackle navigational traffic from existing users: 

Lower CAC: TrafficGuard's Shadow Campaigns & Validation Rules

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