Brands are Turning Loyal Customers into a Recurring Expense
Returning users can distort campaign performance — repeated clicks from existing customers inflate click-through rates and other metrics.
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The 2026 FIFA World Cup was the biggest betting event in history — and, according to new analysis from ad-verification firm TrafficGuard, one of the biggest sources of wasted acquisition spend. Behind the headline wagering numbers, the tournament exposed a problem: a meaningful share of sportsbooks’ “new customer” advertising was never reaching new customers at all.
Returning customers can become an acquisition cost
Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding in TrafficGuard’s data is the role played by returning users: 76.8% of operators’ website traffic comes from returning users, while navigational clicks — paid clicks on searches for a brand’s own name, rather than generic category terms — account for around 12% of ad spend.
The behaviour is understandable: a player wants to quickly return to a familiar sportsbook, sees a paid search result for the brand, and clicks it. But the economics look very different from an acquisition standpoint. The player isn’t new, the click isn’t necessarily fraudulent, and yet the operator still pays for it as if it were an acquisition.
Chad Kinlay, Chief Marketing Officer at TrafficGuard, describes this as turning loyal customers into a recurring expense. “Brands are turning loyal customers into a recurring expense, paying the platforms a toll every time a player walks through their own front door,” he says.
That creates a second, sneaky problem: returning users can distort campaign performance. If existing customers repeatedly click paid ads, they inflate click-through rates and other metrics, making an underperforming acquisition campaign look healthier than it is. Marketers may then allocate more budget to similar campaigns, reinforcing the problem.
The fix isn’t necessarily to stop investing in paid acquisition; it’s to stop treating retention behaviour as acquisition. Returning customers can instead be directed toward owned channels, apps, or direct relationships, while paid media is reserved for the growth the brand doesn’t already have.
Measurement is becoming a competitive advantage
The World Cup exposes a broader problem that extends well beyond sports betting. For years, performance marketing has been built around increasingly sophisticated attribution systems — marketers can see which ad received a click, which campaign generated a conversion, and how much they paid for that outcome. But attribution isn’t the same as incrementality.
A platform can accurately attribute a conversion to an ad while still failing to answer whether the ad changed the customer’s behaviour — a distinction that matters more as customer journeys grow more complex and advertising platforms compete for credit.
The industry’s next measurement challenge isn’t simply identifying what happened; it’s establishing what wouldn’t have happened without the marketing intervention. That’s a harder question, and one that no dashboard can fully answer on its own.
This is where the World Cup story becomes relevant to the wider marketing industry. The problem isn’t that some advertising traffic may be fraudulent — it’s that marketers have increasingly sophisticated systems for measuring activity without an equally sophisticated way of establishing causality. A campaign generating a large number of attributed conversions may look stronger than one producing fewer, even if the latter is responsible for more genuinely new customers.
The goal isn’t to eliminate every click that would have happened organically. It’s to understand which parts of media investment are actually creating additional business, and which are simply intercepting behaviour that was already going to occur. That distinction requires marketers to look past the final conversion and ask a more uncomfortable question: what did the advertising actually change?
The future of performance marketing
The lesson from the World Cup isn’t that brands should spend less when demand surges. They need to understand what they’re buying when they spend more.
Major sporting events, retail peaks, product launches and other cultural moments all create the same temptation: increase acquisition budgets quickly, maximise exposure, and optimise toward whatever the platforms report as a successful outcome. But a surge in attributed conversions doesn’t automatically mean a surge in incremental customers, which is why acquisition-spend decisions made in the heat of a demand spike deserve the same scrutiny as any other investment.
The brands best positioned for the next major demand spike won’t necessarily be the ones that increase their budgets fastest. They’ll be the ones who can tell the difference between customers they genuinely acquired and customers they would have reached anyway.
Sportsbooks happen to have unusually clear signals of customer behaviour — logins, deposits, wagers, account activity — which makes the gap between a new player and a returning one easier to see. But the underlying problem isn’t unique to betting: retailers pay for customers who were already searching for a brand, streaming companies pay to capture existing subscribers, and consumer apps spend to re-engage users who would have returned organically anyway. The mechanics differ; the measurement problem doesn’t.
Kinlay expects the industry to shift toward incremental business impact as the primary performance metric, with traditional efficiency metrics playing a supporting role. “CPCs, CTRs and ROAS will still matter, but efficiency only tells you how well you bought the click; incrementality tells you whether it was worth buying,” he says. “You can’t take ROAS to the bank.”
The challenge is partly technological — marketers need tools that can flag invalid traffic at the click level and distinguish new users from existing customers — but it’s just as much organisational. If CMOs and marketing teams keep getting judged primarily on ROAS, CTR and CPC, those are the metrics teams will keep optimising for. The more important question is whether boards start asking a different one: how many net-new customers did we create, and at what cost?
Data Source: TrafficGuard, “The House Won The World Cup. So Did The Bots.” Tournament window: June 11–July 19, 2026. Market-level figures sourced by TrafficGuard from ESPN and H2 Gambling Capital; platform and audit figures are TrafficGuard’s aggregated, anonymised data.
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