The Cost of Click Fraud in Global Sports Betting

Sports betting operators navigate one of the most volatile and expensive PPC landscapes in digital marketing. In a sector where Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) are under constant pressure from strict regional regulations and aggressive auction bidding, every dollar in a performance budget is critical. With top-tier keywords in the US and EMEA regularly commanding between $50 and $100 per click, budgets are increasingly vulnerable to a silent drain: invalid traffic (IVT).

Current industry data indicates that up to 36% of sports betting ad traffic is invalid, siphoning billions in potential Net Gaming Revenue (NGR). Beyond the immediate waste of budget, this non-genuine activity pollutes the data signals used by automated bidding algorithms, causing them to optimize for "ghost" conversions rather than real, depositing players. For global operators, click fraud protection for sports betting has evolved from a hygiene check to a financial necessity to ensure that paid media delivers measurable, incremental growth.‍

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The Challenge

To expand its user base, one of the biggest bookmakers in Poland heavily relied on pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns via Google Ads for new customer acquisition. However, due to Google's specific policies regarding sports betting advertising, a significant portion of their advertising budget was being wasted on existing customers  that frequently navigated back to the bookmaker’s site by clicking on paid brand ads, a form of invalid traffic (IVT). The bookmaker needed to accurately determine the extent of this issue and find an effective solution to stop the budget loss.

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‍The Solution

By implementing TrafficGuard’s Search solution, the bookmaker was able to:

• Limit repeat paid clicks on brand terms using click-frequency controls aligned with betting behaviour
• Block bot and non-human traffic before spend occurred
• Eliminate non-incremental clicks at scale without affecting legitimate acquisition traffic
• Direct protected budget toward users more likely to convert as new customers

All prevention operated automatically and in real time, without disrupting compliant user journeys or active campaigns. As low-value traffic was removed, paid search performance became more predictable and easier to optimise.‍

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The Results

With non-incremental traffic removed from paid acquisition paths, the bookmaker redirected spend towards genuine growth.

With TrafficGuard in place, the bookmaker saw transformative results:

• 33% of PPC budget was reclaimed from repeat and low-value click behaviour
• Conversion efficiency increased as spend shifted toward higher-intent users
• LTV:CAC ratios improved due to cleaner acquisition data
• 23× return on investment, excluding additional lifetime value from newly acquired customers

By removing noise from paid search, the bookmaker restored confidence in PPC as a scalable acquisition channel and improved efficiency without increasing overall spend.
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"TrafficGuard helped us quantify the exact amount of paid search spend we were losing due to invalid traffic and repeated visits from existing users. These insights allowed us to protect our acquisition budget and confirm that our campaigns were driving real growth through genuinely new customers, rather than being diluted by returning traffic.
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In a highly competitive and regulated market, having clean traffic and reliable conversion signals is critical for making the right bidding and budget decisions. TrafficGuard enabled us to reduce inefficient spend and reallocate it toward acquiring truly new users." - Digital Manager