Education brands bidding on rival names face 9.3% invalid clicks, Lunio finds

Lunio, an invalid traffic detection and prevention company, today published a report on education advertising that puts the click-weighted invalid traffic rate for competitor-targeting campaigns at 9.3%, nearly double the 4.7% recorded for generic, non-branded campaigns, according to Lunio. Across the sector as a whole, the rate rose 33% over nine months, from 4.08% in Q4 2025 to 5.42% in Q2 2026.

In Short

Lunio, a company that sells tools for catching fake and non-human ad clicks, looked at more than five million education ad clicks and found that ads bought on competitors' names had about twice the share of bad clicks as generic ads. Those clicks are paid for, and Lunio estimates that a $5 million budget loses about $232,762 a year to them, flagging autumn recruitment as the period when the damage matters most. The numbers come from Lunio's own client data and a modest sample, so they work as one vendor's benchmark rather than a measurement of the whole market.

What the analysis covers

The report rests on more than five million clicks served on Google, Meta and what the release calls leading native and social platforms between October 2025 and June 2026, according to Lunio. That window spans three quarters - Q4 2025, Q1 2026 and Q2 2026 - and takes in education and e-learning brands. The release does not split that group into universities, course platforms and technology providers, although Lunio's chief executive refers to all three.

Lunio sells invalid traffic detection and prevention, and in earlier reports it has defined the category as any click, impression or conversion that does not originate with a person holding genuine intent. Invalid traffic is a wider category than click fraud, because it also covers accidental clicks and benign automated activity alongside deliberate abuse.

One omission is worth recording. The education release reports no LinkedIn or Bing figures. In Lunio's IT and security study and its banking and lending study, LinkedIn recorded the highest average rate of any channel, at 15.34% and 36.08% respectively, with Bing second in both. The education dataset therefore has a different platform mix, and comparisons across the studies carry that caveat.

Competitor-targeting campaigns

The headline comparison sets two kinds of activity against each other. Campaigns from education brands that target competitor names carried a click-weighted invalid traffic rate of 9.3%, while generic, non-branded campaigns recorded 4.7%, according to Lunio. In plain terms, roughly one click in eleven was invalid in the first group and roughly one in twenty-one in the second. A click-weighted figure gives high-volume campaigns more influence than small ones, and the release supplies neither the click counts nor the number of campaigns behind either rate.

Two campaigns illustrate the spread. An online course platform's campaign aimed at a rival's brand terms ran below 8% in each of the two quarters before Q2 2026, then jumped to 26.1%, according to Lunio. A second competitor-targeting search campaign registered 35.6% in Q4 2025 and 33.6% in Q1 2026, which means that one click in three was invalid quarter after quarter. Neither campaign is named, and the release does not say what changed in the first case.

Lunio attributes the pattern to "an incredibly aggressive brand-building culture" in which institutions and platforms routinely bid on each other's names, and says that setting generates the traffic conditions in which invalid activity thrives. Nick Morley, chief executive of Lunio, put it this way: "Education is one of digital advertising's most aggressive brand-bidding arenas." He added that, with so many clicks wasted at elevated costs, "these brands are losing both money and market share."

That is an interpretation of cause. The release documents a correlation between competitor targeting and higher rates, offers no test that separates the targeting itself from the audiences, platforms or bid levels involved, and draws both the 9.3% and the 4.7% from the same client base.

Sector trend and platform breakdown

The sector rate climbed from 4.08% in Q4 2025 to 5.42% in Q2 2026, a rise of 33%, according to Lunio. The company says the trend can negatively affect the peak autumn recruitment season. No Q1 2026 sector figure is given, so the path between the two endpoints is not visible.

Google

Google averaged 3.70%, less than half of Meta's rate, but moved in the opposite direction. Its rate rose from 3.16% in Q4 2025 to 4.61% in Q2 2026, a 46% increase, according to Lunio.

Two Google channels carry the detail. Google Search rose 137% over the observation period, from 2.32% in Q4 2025 to 5.50% in Q2 2026, which made it the worst-performing Google channel in the sector by the end of the window. Google Demand Gen carried the highest average at 4.16%, yet it was the only channel to improve every quarter, falling from 5.12% in Q4 2025 to 3.43% in Q2 2026 - a decline of about a third.

The ranking therefore depends on the yardstick. By period average, Demand Gen leads; by the final reading, Search does. The release gives no education figures for Performance Max, Display or Shopping, so the remainder of the 4.61% Google rate cannot be reconstructed from the published numbers.

The release is also silent on why Search worsened. Lunio's retail study, published on August 12 and covered by PPC Land, associated Google's AI Max with a rate 72% higher than standard search and with 68% of the invalid clicks in that dataset. Google Ads had told advertisers on August 5 that campaigns using automatically created assets or the campaign-level broad match setting would convert to AI Max for Search starting September 1, 2026. The education release does not mention AI Max, and its observation window closes in June, before any of those conversions were scheduled to begin.

The dollar estimate

Lunio frames the exposure with a worked example. An education brand spending $5 million a year on paid advertising, at an average CPC of $6.23, loses roughly $232,762 in directly wasted spend annually, according to Lunio. Applying a conservative three-to-one return on ad spend, the lost revenue opportunity approaches $698,000 each year.

The arithmetic holds together, with one open question. At $6.23 per click, $5 million buys about 802,600 clicks. The $232,762 figure equals roughly 4.66% of $5 million, which sits close to the 4.7% that the release associates with generic, non-branded campaigns and, in its subheading, with the education industry overall. Tripled, it gives $698,286, matching the stated lost-revenue figure. Had the same calculation used the Q2 2026 sector rate of 5.42%, the wasted-spend result would be about $271,000 and the revenue figure about $813,000.

The release does not say which rate underlies the estimate. It also describes 4.7% in two ways: the subheading calls it the overall education rate, while the body attributes it to generic, non-branded campaigns. The Q4 2025 and Q2 2026 sector readings of 4.08% and 5.42% are given separately. Reading 4.7% as a nine-month sector average would fit all of the figures, but the release does not state that.

Reading a vendor's numbers

Lunio's own description in the release says it provides tools to detect, analyze and block invalid traffic, so the company benefits when invalid traffic is judged a serious problem. That does not make the measurements wrong. It does mean they describe Lunio's client base rather than a random sample of advertisers.

Several details are absent. The release does not state how many advertisers or accounts contributed to the five million clicks, how many campaigns sit behind the competitor-targeting figure, or whether the accounts were protected or running in monitor-only mode. The IT and security study covered in June specified monitor-only collection, which gives an unfiltered view of what passes platform defences; the education release is silent on the point.

Scale matters as well. Five million clicks is a small fraction of the 64 million behind the IT and security study, the 86 million behind the banking study and the 414 million behind the retail study. With a click-weighted rate, a handful of large campaigns running at 30% or more can move the aggregate noticeably, and the two unnamed campaigns above sit at exactly that level.

Consistency has been an issue before. In its banking materials, as PPC Land reported on July 8, a covering note cited 5.29% where the release itself stated 5.92%.

How the figures sit among Lunio's sector studies

Lunio has now published four sector analyses in four months, each built on a $5 million annual spend and a three-to-one return assumption. Setting them side by side requires care, since the windows and client mixes differ.

Lunio sector report	Clicks analyzed	Window	Overall invalid traffic rate
IT and security	64 million	Q3 2025 to Q1 2026	4.29%
Banking, lending and credit	86 million	July 2025 to March 2026	5.92%
Retail	414 million	October 2025 to June 2026	5% (5.54% in Q2 2026)
Education and e-learning	More than 5 million	October 2025 to June 2026	4.7% per the release subheading (5.42% in Q2 2026)

Retail and education share the same window, and both sector rates rose by about a third between Q4 2025 and Q2 2026. Retail went from 4.18% to 5.54%, as the August retail coverage recorded; education went from 4.08% to 5.42%. Platform patterns diverge. Meta averaged 5.99% in retail against 8.34% in education, while Google averaged 4.75% in retail against 3.70% in education.

On Google Search, education's Q2 2026 reading of 5.50% is close to the 5.51% average that the banking study recorded for the channel, which that study identified as the highest of any Google campaign type in the category. In the IT and security study, Search rose from 3.95% to 4.78% in two quarters. Demand Gen averaged 4.27% there, 3.32% in banking and 4.16% in education.

Why it matters for the marketing community

Competitor-name bidding is commonly assessed on cost per click and conversion rate. The report adds a third variable: the share of paid clicks that never came from a person with genuine intent. If the click-weighted gap between 9.3% and 4.7% holds up outside Lunio's client base, the effective cost of a competitor-targeting click is higher than its price suggests.

The second consequence concerns data rather than budget. PPC Land's June coverage of Lunio's IT and security report described the company's argument that invalid traffic corrupts the conversion signals fed back into automated bidding, so that platforms learn from interactions that never involved a buyer. In a sector where lead forms and enrolment enquiries are the conversion events, that argument bears on lead quality as well as media efficiency.

A third point is trust in platform defences. Lunio's State of Click Fraud survey, published on July 15, 2026, polled 131 senior marketing leaders in May. It found that 75.6% estimate losing more than 5% of monthly performance budget to invalid traffic and that 5.3% run a dedicated prevention platform. The most cited barrier to adoption was the belief, held by 39.7%, that major advertising platforms already handle prevention sufficiently. The education data, in which Meta and Google Search both show rates that platform filtering did not eliminate, speaks directly to that belief, though a vendor-run survey and a vendor-run dataset cannot settle it alone.

Timing also counts. Education budgets concentrate around recruitment cycles, and Lunio links its findings to the autumn period. Whether a 5.42% sector rate in Q2 2026 persists into the autumn quarter is not something the report can answer; its window closes in June.

Timeline

October to December 2025 - Q4 2025: Lunio records a sector invalid traffic rate of 4.08% for education and e-learning brands, a Google Search rate of 2.32%, a Demand Gen rate of 5.12%, and a competitor-targeting search campaign at 35.6%.
January to March 2026 - Q1 2026: Meta's invalid traffic rate peaks at 9.20% in the education dataset, and the same competitor-targeting campaign registers 33.6%.
April to June 2026 - Q2 2026: the sector rate reaches 5.42%, Google Search 5.50% and Meta 7.31%, and an online course platform's competitor-targeting campaign jumps to 26.1%.
May 2026 - Lunio fields a survey of 131 senior marketing leaders.
June 13, 2026 - PPC Land covers Lunio's IT and security report, based on 64 million clicks, with LinkedIn at 17.62% in Q1 2026.
July 8, 2026 - PPC Land covers Lunio's banking, lending and credit report, which finds an overall rate of 5.92% across 86 million clicks.
July 15, 2026 - Lunio publishes its State of Click Fraud Report 2026: 75.6% of respondents estimate losing more than 5% of monthly performance budget, and 5.3% use a dedicated tool.
August 5, 2026 - Google Ads emails advertisers that campaigns with automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match convert to AI Max for Search starting September 1.
August 12, 2026 - Lunio publishes its retail study across 414 million clicks, finding AI Max search campaigns at 5.28% against 3.07% for standard search.
September 1, 2026 - Scheduled start of the AI Max conversions for eligible campaigns.
October 6, 2026 - Lunio publishes its education and e-learning report, covering more than five million clicks from October 2025 to June 2026.

LinkedIn drives the most bot clicks per ad dollar, new report finds - Lunio's June 13, 2026 IT and security analysis of 64 million clicks, with platform rates and the argument that invalid traffic corrupts bidding signals.
Banking ads lose $295K yearly to fraud, Lunio finds - the July 8, 2026 coverage of Lunio's banking and lending study, including the Google Search finding and the same $5 million worked example.
Lunio survey on marketers and invalid traffic tools - the July 15, 2026 State of Click Fraud Report 2026, a survey of 131 senior marketing leaders.
AI Max shows 72% more invalid traffic in retail search, Lunio finds - the August 13, 2026 coverage of Lunio's retail study covering the same October 2025 to June 2026 window.

Summary

Who: Lunio, an invalid traffic detection and prevention company, published the report. Nick Morley, its chief executive, is quoted in the release. The findings concern education and e-learning advertisers on Google, Meta and native and social platforms.

What: Lunio found a click-weighted invalid traffic rate of 9.3% for competitor-targeting campaigns against 4.7% for generic, non-branded campaigns. The sector rate rose 33%, from 4.08% in Q4 2025 to 5.42% in Q2 2026. Meta averaged 8.34%, Google 3.70%, Google Search rose 137% to 5.50%, and Demand Gen fell from 5.12% to 3.43%. Lunio estimates about $232,762 in wasted spend, and a lost revenue opportunity approaching $698,000, for a brand spending $5 million a year at a $6.23 CPC.

When: Lunio published the report today, October 6, 2026. The analysis covers October 2025 to June 2026.

Where: The release is dated New York and covers paid media on Google, Meta and leading native and social platforms. It does not break results down by country.

Why: The figures quantify invalid traffic in a sector that routinely bids on competitors' names, ahead of the autumn recruitment period. They come from a vendor's own client data, on a sample of more than five million clicks, and the release leaves the sample composition and the basis of its dollar estimate unstated.