Introduction

P1 Travel (https://p1travel.com) is a global ticketing company that sells access to some of the world’s biggest events—from Premier League matches and Formula 1 races to concerts at Wembley Stadium. With a heavy emphasis on performance marketing, the team behind P1 Travel operates in one of the most competitive and fast-paced advertising environments: global sports and entertainment.

At the heart of it all is a small but mighty marketing team — including Marco, who recently stepped down as Digital Marketing Lead in June, and Tjardo, now taking the reins over Communications following Marco’s handover.

The pair runs global ad campaigns, where the risk of ad fraud and wasted spend increases exponentially. They noticed a discrepancy between clicks reported by ad platforms and those visible in Google Analytics, leading them to suspect invalid traffic.

Initial Engagement with Spider AF

“We were increasingly struggling with our budget. CPCs are really going up on Google and pretty much on all channels. Especially with Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns, the gap between the clicks reported by the platforms and what you actually see in GA is also really big.”

“We advertise worldwide, and you can’t just exclude certain things or certain countries, so you run more risk of fraudulent clicks and a lot of waste on your ad spend. That’s where Spider can help.”

- Did you have any particular issues you hoped Spider AF would help you solve? What were your expectations?

 “So we felt like there was something going on with traffic that wasn't real. We were looking for a tool that could give some insight into that.”

- What do you consider to be your main KPIs when determining the performance of an ad campaign?

While their primary goal is to sell out events, they also focus on hitting their ROAS targets and staying within budget.

“The most important one is always the ROAS of our campaigns. We also always look at sub-metrics like conversion rate and average order value.”

Experience with Spider AF

- Upon starting the trial with Spider AF, what was your initial impression? Were there any insights that stood out to you in particular?

“Communication went well—short lines, easy contact. And the tool itself I found just very... I don’t want to say basic, but very clear. So if you don’t want to dive in deep, you can still quickly see high-level figures. And if you do want to go deeper, that’s also possible.”

- Since starting with Spider AF, you were able to avoid $14.8k in wasted ad spend; has this had any impact on your business/marketing campaigns?

“While it's difficult to identify it due to so many variables, especially in our market, we have seen a consistent improvement in ROAS since integrating Spider AF.”

▼ Graph of Monthly Cost Saved from Fraudulent Clicks Jan - May 2025

- Did you notice any quantifiable improvements?

“To double-check, we looked at what IP addresses are being excluded, and you really do see that it’s fraudulent traffic. So we are spending the budget more efficiently.”

- How do you feel about these changes?

“Our business is very demand-based, so whether ROAS is affected is hard to say, but we do see that it’s stopping fraudulent traffic, so it must be having an effect.”

- According to your dashboard, 80% of fraudulent clicks have come from data centers. What was your takeaway from this learning?

“Yeah, we kind of expected that, actually—especially in our business with tickets. There’s a lot of competition that either wants to sabotage your campaigns, drain your budget, or just scrape prices or comb through your website. So it was actually a fairly expected outcome.”

Additional Benefits

- Were there any unexpected benefits or changes as a result of using Spider AF?

“Our data team has now also included the data Spider AF provides—about whether traffic is a bot or fraudulent—into our Power BI dashboards. So now we can also see spikes in that kind of traffic. That was a nice bonus.”

Future Plans

- What pain points or key improvements do you anticipate now that Spider AF is implemented?

“I think the next step might be to further fine-tune, and maybe look into whether G-masking can be broken down further. I don’t know if it’s possible to have different categories within G-masking, because now it’s all lumped together, but maybe there’s still some room for optimization there.”

Feedback and Suggestions

- Which part of Spider AF or our support services do you find most valuable and beneficial?

“What I found most valuable was being able to clearly see which clicks were blocked and why — not just a total count, but the actual reasoning. For example, seeing that a visitor claimed to be from the UK but was actually coming from Singapore. That kind of detail — IP, location, and trigger reason — was really insightful.”

“As Tjardo mentioned, maybe G-masking could be split out more clearly. But what really stood out for me was getting a transparent view of how each platform performs when it comes to bot traffic. It was honestly surprising to see that almost no bot traffic comes from Facebook. It’s really just Google — which also happens to be our biggest channel.”

- Are there any features or functionalities that you would like to see added to Spider AF in the future?

“I had the impression that the date range only goes back two months, I believe. I’d definitely find it interesting if we could go back 6 months or a year from our end.”

Additional Challenges

- Aside from fraudulent clicks, are there any other challenges or issues in your digital campaigns that you would like assistance with?

“Yes, definitely.... It’s more about the constant evolution of Google’s black box. You get less and less insight into things like keywords and search terms that trigger your ads.”

“I’m not sure if that’s something Spider AF can help us with directly, since it’s part of a bigger issue — how everything in Google and other PPC platforms has become a black box. But by blocking fraudulent clicks, Spider AF does make things a little less opaque. So that’s definitely an area where we value any help we can get.”

- Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. We look forward to continuing to support your endeavors!

Spider AF | Globally Recognized Ad Fraud Prevention Tool

If you're struggling with wasted ad spend, poor CPA, or unwanted ad placements, try Spider AF’s free diagnostic tool. No matter the platform, or size of your team, start protecting your campaigns today!

Click below for a free diagnostic of up to one month. Don’t miss this chance!

https://spideraf.com/sign-up