How Lottomart Unlocked a Six-Figure Acquisition Budget with Click Fraud Protection for Online Gambling

‍The Hidden Cost of Click Fraud in Online Gambling PPC Advertising

Online gambling operates in one of the most tightly regulated and expensive paid search environments in digital marketing. In the UK, CPCs for high-intent keywords regularly reach £30–£60, with competitive terms surpassing £80 per click. Every pound in an acquisition budget carries significant commercial weight.

Paid search sits at the centre of new player acquisition for gambling operators, and the data behind it directly shapes how budgets are allocated across campaigns. Yet platform restrictions limit audience segmentation, retargeting, and user exclusions, meaning acquisition campaigns often capture a mix of genuinely new players, returning users navigating via search, and non-genuine traffic.

In regulated gambling, the risk compounds further,  when synthetic users convert as first-time depositors, operators absorb both the media cost and the bonus payout, two budget lines hit by a single fraudulent event.

‍The Challenge

Lottomart invests heavily in paid search as a primary driver of new depositing player acquisition across the UK's regulated online lottery market. As investment scaled, two sources of inefficiency were quietly consuming budget that should have been reaching genuine new players.

• Returning user waste on brand search: Existing users were triggering paid ads despite having clear intent to return organically. Lottomart was paying for logins and account access at the same CPC as a genuinely new player, spend that delivered no incremental value.
  
  
• Bot activity contaminating spend and signals: Sophisticated non-human sources were generating repeat click behaviour that mimicked genuine users, absorbing budget and distorting the optimisation signals teams relied on to make performance decisions.

Without intervention, both problems would continue to scale alongside investment, placing upward pressure on CAC and eroding confidence in performance reporting.

The Solution

Lottomart deployed TrafficGuard for Search across its Google PPC portfolio to prevent invalid traffic and non-incremental spend from eroding acquisition budget before spend was committed.

The solution delivered control across three areas:

• Shadow campaigns to reduce brand CPC leakage: Traffic was routed through shadow campaign logic to lower the effective CPC on brand-driven demand, creating measurable savings on high-intent branded terms without sacrificing demand capture or market presence.
  
  
• Returning user prevention to stop paying for organic returns: Users identified as likely to return via organic Google navigation were excluded from paid ad triggers in real time, ensuring acquisition budget was directed exclusively toward users who required a paid touchpoint to convert.
  
  
• Real-time bot prevention including sophisticated IVT: TrafficGuard detected cases where a single hosting IP produced multiple distinct user identifiers within the same day, a pattern consistent with coordinated non-human activity. Spend on these sources was blocked before it occurred, not flagged after the fact.

Prevention operated automatically in the background without disrupting legitimate player journeys or compromising regulatory compliance.

The Results

With TrafficGuard in place, Lottomart delivered clear and measurable outcomes across its paid search acquisition strategy.

Once returning user distortion and invalid traffic were mitigated, budget allocation became closely aligned with genuine incremental acquisition:

• 6% of total paid search spend protected from invalid traffic and non-incremental waste
• 49% of returning users came back organically, freeing the budget for net-new acquisition
• £101k in annualised budget unlocked with a 5X ROI on TrafficGuard's investment

The 49% organic return rate is a critical insight for any gambling operator running brand PPC: nearly half of returning users who were previously clicking paid ads came back through organic search once the paid trigger was removed. This means the budget spent on those clicks was subsidising navigation, not driving acquisition.
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Through real-time click fraud prevention, Lottomart strengthened acquisition efficiency without increasing overall spend.

Working with TrafficGuard has helped streamline our paid search acquisition. By reducing invalid traffic without sacrificing high-performing sources, we've seen clear improvements and look forward to continuing the partnership.
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Jędrzej Kociubiński – Digital Acquisition Manager, Lottomart