$50 Billion was Wagered. Were Ads Buying Customers Twice?

“The real question isn’t ‘how fast can we deploy budget?’ It’s ‘how many of these dollars ever touch a genuinely new customer?'” Kinlay says.

The distinction matters most when advertising costs are rising, and marketers are competing aggressively for the same high-intent audiences.

The Hidden Cost of Acquisition

When marketers talk about wasted advertising spend, the conversation usually starts with bots and fraudulent clicks — an obvious problem, since a non-human user has no intention of making a deposit, yet the advertiser still pays for the interaction.

TrafficGuard’s data points to a second, less obvious form of waste, because in this case, the user is real. Its audit benchmark shows an average invalid-traffic rate of 22% across sports betting operators that ran an audit period with the company. 

TrafficGuard’s definition covers bots and other invalid traffic, as well as returning, non-incremental users — existing players who click paid ads to return to an operator they already use. The company says that the second category is often the larger of the two.

A bot clicking an ad is clearly not a customer, but an existing customer clicking one is murkier: the click is real, the person is real, and the activity may even convert. If that person was already going to return, though, the advertising didn’t create the customer — it just captured demand that already existed. That makes incrementality a different question from traffic quality: a click can be valid without being valuable.

TrafficGuard estimates that applying its 22% average audit benchmark to unprotected operators would equate to roughly $30 million to $50 million in exposed search spend during the tournament, potentially rising above $100 million once affiliate and social spending are included. 

That figure is drawn from the company’s audit benchmark applied to unprotected operators generally, not a direct measurement showing that 22% of every operator’s World Cup spend specifically was wasted.

Kinlay says the benchmark reflects two distinct forms of traffic: loyal customers clicking branded ads to return to an operator, and deliberate fraud involving bots and promotional abuse.

“You can’t outspend a leak; you fix it,” he says.

The point extends well beyond sports betting. If acquisition teams respond to poor-quality traffic by simply putting more money into the same campaigns, they risk scaling the problem rather than solving it.

When Demand Surges, So Does the Risk

The World Cup didn’t produce a uniform increase in advertising spend — money followed the markets where competition for players was intensifying fastest. Average daily search spend rose 99% in Latin America, driven by Brazil; 74.4% in APAC and Oceania; 50% in Europe; 34.4% in Africa; and 27% in North America.

That pattern matters because performance marketing gets harder to evaluate as spend moves faster. A marketer may have only hours to adjust bids, budgets and targeting before a major match, and the commercial pressure is to capture as much demand as possible before the moment disappears — which creates a natural bias toward speed over scrutiny, making it harder to tell apart:

• New customers and returning customers.
• Incremental demand and existing demand.
• Genuine prospects and invalid traffic.
• A campaign that created a conversion and one that simply received credit for it.

“Scale is camouflage,” Kinlay says. When spending increases dramatically, traffic volumes increase with it, and a sudden spike in suspicious activity can look like normal tournament behaviour — making it harder for teams to isolate problems while the campaign is still running.

“When daily spend ramps up by 126%, nobody reviews traffic quality at 126% more than the usual rate — anomalies just look like tournament enthusiasm, and IVT can blend in with the high volume of traffic completely undetected,” he says.

That makes timing critical. By the time a quarterly performance review identifies a problem, the opportunity to recover the media spend has already passed.

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?

The Question Marketers Need to Answer

The World Cup created an extraordinary opportunity for sports betting operators — and an environment in which acquisition spending could accelerate faster than marketers could establish what that spending was actually delivering.

A click can be real. A conversion can be real. And the acquisition can still be non-incremental. As performance marketing grows more expensive and increasingly automated, that distinction will matter far beyond sports betting.

The next big tournament will bring another surge in acquisition spending. The brands that succeed won’t necessarily be the ones that spent the most — they’ll be the ones that can prove which part of that spending actually created growth.

Kinlay’s view is clear: “The winners of the next cycle won’t be the operators who spent the most, but the ones who can prove every incremental dollar bought an incremental player.”

Because the future of performance marketing may not be about buying more traffic. It may be about proving which traffic was worth buying.

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