How Avis grew ad conversions by 123%

Avis runs paid search across African markets, with a strong focus on South Africa. Their team tracks CTR, CPC, CPA and ROI, but fake and low-quality clicks were distorting those numbers and draining budget before real renters ever arrived.

We spoke with Avis's paid media consultant for search. Here's what was broken, what they tried, and what changed after ClickPatrol.

The challenge

Search traffic quality in South Africa is harder to police than in Europe or North America. Without strong invalid-traffic controls, Avis saw higher CPA, lower CTR and weaker conversion rates, despite constant manual campaign tweaks.

“Before ClickPatrol, we attempted to manually adjust our campaigns to solve the challenge of fake traffic. We tried to set our campaigns to target specific regions only, adding negative keywords and other methods, but they never really protected us from fake traffic.”

Manual work burned time and still left campaigns exposed. A previous click-fraud tool hadn't delivered either. Support for Africa was slow and results never matched the promise.

The approach

Avis chose ClickPatrol for three practical reasons: a clear dashboard of traffic risk, fast onboarding, and an interface the team could use every morning without a separate ops process.

• Connected Google Ads and started monitoring risk levels (low / medium / high)
• Blocked high-risk and fraudulent clicks automatically
• Used the dashboard as a daily check on blocked share and traffic quality

“ClickPatrol is now part of my morning routine. Every day, I check the amount of low, medium, and high-risk traffic our campaigns receive and the percentage of fake traffic blocked.”

Within roughly three months, protecting traffic quality was no longer a manual firefight. It was a default part of how the team ran search.

The results

With invalid traffic filtered out, more of the budget reached people who could actually book a car. Campaign performance moved across the board:

• +123.3%Conversions
• +91.0%CTR
• −36.1%CPA
• +47.6%Clicks
• −3.4%CPC
• DailyRisk monitoring

“We've always wanted to improve our campaign performance, and eliminating fake clicks played a huge part in helping us achieve our goal, as this allows us to use our budget efficiently.”

Cleaner click data also means smarter bidding signals over time: Google's algorithms learn from real users, not bots and scrapers, so efficiency compounds beyond the first month of blocked waste.