Education advertisers love fighting over competitor names. But a new Lunio report, published October 6, makes that battle look a lot more expensive than the bid itself.
The report, covering more than five million education and e-learning clicks between October 2025 and June 2026, found a 9.3% click-weighted invalid traffic rate on competitor-targeting campaigns. Generic, non-branded campaigns came in at 4.7%.
Why the gap matters
That means roughly one in eleven clicks on competitor names was not a real prospect, compared with about one in twenty-one on generic campaigns. And the sector is not improving: invalid traffic across education rose 33%, from 4.08% in Q4 2025 to 5.42% in Q2 2026, just as autumn recruitment budgets start to peak.
Where the junk clicks sit
- Meta averaged 8.34% across the window, peaking at 9.20% in Q1 2026.
- Google sat lower at 3.70%, but climbed 46% from 3.16% in Q4 2025 to 4.61% in Q2 2026.
- Google Search jumped 137% to 5.50% by Q2 2026, making it the worst Google channel at the final reading.
- Demand Gen carried the highest Google average at 4.16%, yet fell every quarter to 3.43%.
Two unnamed campaigns show the tail risk. One competitor-targeting search campaign ran at 35.6% and 33.6% in consecutive quarters—roughly one click in three wasted. An online course platform’s rival-name campaign sat below 8% before jumping to 26.1% in Q2 2026.
The money version
Lunio translates this into advertiser terms. A brand spending $5 million a year at a $6.23 CPC would lose about $232,762 in direct wasted spend annually. At a conservative 3:1 return on ad spend, that approaches $698,000 in lost revenue opportunity.
Nick Morley, Lunio’s chief executive, frames education as “one of digital advertising’s most aggressive brand-bidding arenas” and argues brands are “losing both money and market share.”
Beyond wasted budget
Invalid clicks do not just burn cash. They feed bad signals back into automated bidding, teaching systems to chase interactions that never had enrollment intent. When lead forms are the conversion event, the problem is not only media efficiency—it is lead quality.
The report also lands near a stubborn trust gap. In Lunio’s July survey of 131 senior marketing leaders, 75.6% estimated losing more than 5% of monthly performance budget to invalid traffic, yet only 5.3% ran a dedicated prevention tool. The top barrier? 39.7% said major platforms already handle prevention sufficiently.
Use it as a benchmark
These figures come from Lunio’s own client base, not a random sample, and the education dataset is far smaller than the company’s retail study. That makes the 9.3% figure a directional benchmark rather than a market-wide verdict.
Still, the action is clear for performance marketers. Before attacking or defending expensive competitor terms during peak recruitment, pull log-level data and compare invalid traffic by platform and quarter. A click that cannot convert should not be writing your bidding story.
Source: PPC Land
