TrafficGuard Empowered OnTheMarket, Unlocking £79k in Savings

‍

Winning Results With TrafficGuard   

‍

• OnTheMarket has unlocked over £79,000 of budget savings across its PPC channel using TrafficGuard  

• In February 2023 Traffic Guard helped OnTheMarket reduce invalid traffic rates by 9%

• As yearly invalid traffic rates have decreased, conversion rates have improved by 8%  

OnTheMarket is one of the UK’s leading property search websites, displaying thousands of properties to rent or buy. Launched in 2015 as a majority agent-owned company, OnTheMarket’s aim is to create value for its property advertiser customers.  

To increase traffic to its website, OnTheMarket was using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. As the team invested more time, budget and resource into this channel, OnTheMarket wanted to ensure it was not wasting money on fraudulent traffic. With the help of TrafficGuard’s threat detection tools, OnTheMarket is now confident it is delivering only genuine traffic to its website.

The Fight Against Bots 

OnTheMarket was not realising the full value of its budgets due to losing spend to unknown, fraudulent sources.  The marketing team was dealing with the challenge of sophisticated bots that were hampering the effectiveness of its PPC activity. Bots refer to non-human traffic that imitates that of a real user, maliciously clicking on ads that don’t convert into genuine leads. At first glance, the influx of clicks was taken as a positive metric, but budget was being drained and conversions were subsequently lower than they should have been.  

Additionally, OnTheMarket was receiving abnormal levels of ad engagement across multiple campaigns. It saw users repeatedly clicking on search ads rather than using organic search results to reach the website. The team needed to identify this poor user behaviour and determine if those additional clicks were adding any incremental value to the campaigns.   

When audited by TrafficGuard, OnTheMarket’s invalid click rate was an alarming 5.6%, costing approximately £9.5k on invalid traffic every month, budget lost to bots, hosts, malware and both non-incremental and non-genuine engagement. The company needed a solution that was going to tackle the fraud head-on, and partnered with TrafficGuard’s invalid traffic mitigation tool.  

‍

Real-Time Solutions 

TrafficGuard analysed data from each click and enriched it with the intelligence gained from analysis across its universal fraud prevention suite to robustly identify sources of invalid traffic.  

TrafficGuard provided OnTheMarket with a comprehensive dashboard, allowing the team to view the number of clicks received per device on their Google ads account and campaigns. With automated prevention and the ability to customise validation rules to ensure optimal clicks per device, conversion rates increased by 22% in February 2023 alone. As a result of this improvement in the quality of traffic, the company could now drive efficiency to the campaigns and unlock genuine results and insights. 

By actively analysing ever-evolving threats, TrafficGuard utilised its prevention mode to mitigate bots. It added the IPs of these hosts to pre-bid exclusion lists to prevent further invalid traffic on ads and minimise the threat. Empowering OnTheMarket with real-time analysis, this enabled the team to exclude non-human elements in the traffic to optimise and nurture the real data and sources in the account.   

As a direct result of TrafficGuard’s solution, in February 2023, invalid traffic rates went down 9%, which improved the overall quality of the traffic to OnTheMarket. Since working with TrafficGuard, the company has unlocked over £79,000, which has been reinvested into nurturing genuine leads.  

‍

Long Term Defence 

OnTheMarket needed to understand where the invalid traffic was coming from that was negatively affecting its advertising performance, eating into its budget and restricting business growth. The team needed a solution that would seamlessly integrate behind the scenes to defend against fraud and provide the clarity they needed to unlock the best return on ad spend.  

TrafficGuard’s PPC Protect solution automatically detected invalid traffic and dynamically updated OnTheMarket’s IP exclusion list to give them the transparency and visibility to focus efforts on optimisation and growth. The team unlocked a new level of efficiency with the TrafficGuard portal, where they could view key insights and monitor traffic to grow with confidence.     

‍

"Thanks to TrafficGuard, we no longer face the challenge of fake clicks on our PPC advertising. Since using TrafficGuard, we saved over £79,000, allowing us to allocate our budget more effectively. We would recommend TrafficGuard to any business looking to help protect their digital advertising investment."  OnTheMarket's Marketing Team  

‍‍

‍

‍