Now Finance | Bots vs. Banks: Investigating the Impact of Bot Traffic in the Finance Sector

NOW Finance is a leading non-bank lender that has revolutionised the way individuals access personal loans. They were curious as to whether ad fraud and invalid traffic was an issue, so they brought TrafficGuard on board to investigate to see if ad fraud was impacting their Google Ads ROI with inflated metrics.

NOW Finance were running multiple Google ads campaigns to drive interest in their loans. As a financial services company, there are two main threats to them from invalid traffic. 

1) Bots that generate fraudulent traffic, inflate ad impressions, and skew campaign performance metrics. 

2) The financial services industry has the potential for high-value conversions but this comes at a cost in the form of expensive PPC keywords. It is vital that the budget is not wasted on users who repeatedly click on these expensive ads, costs that add no incremental value, drive up acquisition costs and lower customer lifetime value. 

‍

Solution

Looking to safeguard their advertising campaigns against fraudulent activity and invalid traffic, NOW Finance turned to TrafficGuard's protection and verification platform. It is crucial to tackle invalid traffic as early as possible and with TrafficGuard's PPC solution, NOW Finance were able to prevent invalid traffic in real-time at the click level so the budget was not being lost but was reinvested in real time to ensure positive business outcomes through increased reach and lower cost per conversion.

‍

Results

• 96% reduction in IVT spend rate (5.6% in the detection was reduced to 0.2% in the 1st month) 
• Bot traffic reduced to just 0.2% (down from 7.2%) 
• Engagement delivering no incremental value was reduced from 0.4% to 0.04%

‍

Outcomes

Incremental conversions opportunity
In just the first month, TrafficGuard’s real-time IVT prevention resulted in budgets being automatically reinvested in quality traffic increasing NOW Finance’s loan application conversions by 11% and resulting in a reduced cost of acquisition from the search channel.

Data & Insights
Thanks to TrafficGuard, NOW Finance  gained a whole new level of insight into their Google ads campaigns. With detailed data at their fingertips, NOW Finance were able to pinpoint where their fraudulent activity was coming from and optimise accordingly.  In a world where every marketing dollar counts, this level of precision and optimisation is crucial to staying ahead of the competition.
‍

We are always looking for ways to improve our CPA, and wanted to see if a reduction of fraudulent clicks would help do that. TrafficGuard are uniquely placed to help us with this problem and have helped us eliminate budget wastage, which has enabled us to make our paid campaigns more efficient, and really help us reach that next level of growth. Andrew Coyne, Search & Performance Marketing Manager.

‍

‍

‍