Digital marketing has become a pillar of every company's customer acquisition process. Paid ads are cost-effective acquisition channels since companies pay per click, compared to legacy advertising models that require upfront payments with no way to measure engagement.
However, customer acquisition channels are replete with fraudulent activity. For instance, scammers repeatedly click a company's ads, increasing costs and reducing ROAS. Lunio, a Manchester, U.K-based startup, believes it has the ideal solution for this problem.
The company recently raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Smedvig Capital and is expanding its click fraud prevention platform.
So how does Lunio work?
The problem of invalid clicks
Lunio reckons around 36 percent of ad clicks in 2021 were invalid. An invalid click is either fraudulent or unintended. The latter is relatively harmless and occurs due to poor UX (called Dark UX) causing users to click wrong areas of a screen.
The former is a huge problem in the PPC industry. Lunio claims that it blocked over 100 million fraudulent clicks in 2021 alone, and expects this number to grow in 2022. The platform begins by analyzing all clicks from a channel and screening clicks for patterns.
Fraud perpetrators tend to leave footprints when targeting a company, and Lunio's engine identifies such behavior. As a result, marketers can isolate these clicks and work to prevent them in the future. Lunio also blocks such clicks from occurring, helping marketers to improve ROAS on their campaigns.
Companies can view click data on a centralized dashboard and dive deeper into these datasets to identify buying patterns. Lunio feeds these conclusions back into acquisition channels to refine audiences and isolate high-quality clicks. All click data is stored as first-party data, giving marketers all the access they need for further analysis.
Bringing cybersecurity tactics to PPC
Click fraud belongs to a growing list of malicious cyber activities worldwide. While it might not rank high on the list of cybercrimes compared to data breaches, click fraud causes significant damage to its victims.
Cybersecurity analysis and data science techniques play a huge role in helping Lunio discern problematic behavior and nipping it in the bud. The company employs security experts and data scientists to sift through click data and reveal any patterns that point to fraudulent activity.
This analysis bears significant fruit. Lunio routinely leverages conclusions derived from a channel's analysis and applies them to another with the aim to boost ROAS. The result is a layer of ad protection that keeps marketing ad spending in check.
Lunio also offers out-of-the-box benefits to its clients. Having analyzed billions of clicks, the company can quickly detect fraudulent behavior. For instance, Lunio can help a new customer quickly identify fraudulent patterns on Google Ads and export those learnings to Facebook.
As a result, the customer's ad campaigns receive an instant boost. Through this process, Lunio helps a company arrive at its ideal audience. An automated AI engine powers these fraud detection techniques. Lunio's clients, many of whom are agencies managing multiple accounts simultaneously, do not need to update the algorithm or worry about patches.
Everything occurs automatically, and the algorithm gets smarter as it receives exposure to more clicks. Lunio also points out that most fraudulent clicks arrive from bots, not humans.
Privacy protected through first-party data
Given the complex web of laws surrounding marketing data, advertisers must take care to store and avoid dataset misuse. Lunio offers a simple solution for marketers looking to avoid any data privacy issues. First, all click data is stored as first-party data, giving advertisers deep access legally.
Next, Lunio ensures all audience and campaign data comply with data privacy laws, helping marketers remain on the right side of the law. The startup's solution covers over 25 ad networks, ensuring complete data compliance and fraud protection.
Lunio integrates with ad platforms and tag managers via APIs. The platform is fully encrypted, stores no third-party cookies, and is GDPR compliant, meaning marketers will not find themselves crossing any regulatory lines.
* This is a contributed article and this content does not necessarily represent the views of techtimes.com