Last updated:
Jun 24, 2025
Culligan Harvey, the UK’s leading manufacturer of water softeners and filtration systems, used Lunio to improve lead quality and maximise return on ad spend. By significantly reducing invalid traffic across search and social channels, Culligan Harvey filtered out junk leads, protected budget efficiency, and increased conversion rates during a critical phase of brand growth.
• 54% reduction in Invalid Traffic (IVT)
• 42% increase in Lead to Demo conversions
• 10% increase in Lead to MQL rate
Culligan Harvey is the UK’s leading manufacturer of water softeners and filtration systems, predominantly serving B2C customers in hard water areas across the UK, especially in areas such as London and the southeast.
With over 47 years of heritage, Culligan Harvey continues to expand into new markets and product categories, backed by a growing team and loyal customer base.
Leading their paid media strategy is Digital Marketing Manager Natalia Georgiadou, supported by eCommerce & Digital Manager Oliver Smith. Together, they are responsible for ensuring Culligan Harvey’s paid search ad budget is used to drive qualified leads as efficiently as possible.
As part of their ongoing lead generation efforts, the team at Culligan Harvey set out to improve the quality of inbound leads by eliminating fake and spam submissions. With media costs rising and budgets under tighter scrutiny, the team needed to concentrate ad spend on high-intent prospects - by finding a way to tackle junk data and form submissions that never convert.
In mid-2022, Culligan Harvey saw a sharp rise in low-quality and spam leads coming through their paid campaigns. Many submissions contained invalid contact details (or none at all) - making it impossible to qualify them as genuine MQLs (marketing-qualified leads).
This was especially damaging in standard search campaigns, where YoY cost-per-click inflation was squeezing profit margins.
“In an ideal world, we’d convert 100% of our leads to demos - but we were only seeing about 50% convert. A lot of the submissions had missing or fake contact details. It was clear something wasn’t right.”
— Oliver Smith, eCommerce & Digital Manager
The problem wasn’t just poor form fills. Culligan Harvey also suspected bad actors were deliberately attempting to drain their ad spend by clicking repeatedly on ads - driving up costs without any additional conversions.
Beyond the media waste, fake leads created operational friction:
Culligan Harvey had no prior experience with invalid traffic solutions. And after conducting thorough industry research, they found that Lunio ticked all the boxes when it came to choosing the most effective IVT solution for them.
Culligan Harvey began working with Lunio towards the end of 2022, following a quick onboarding process. Within weeks, Lunio was actively protecting Culligan Harvey’s key acquisition channels:
Lunio’s automated protection worked in the background, without adding complexity to the team’s daily workflows.
“It’s quite self-managed. We were up and running without needing loads of input, which was perfect given our bandwidth at the time.”
Oliver Smith, eCommerce & Digital Manager
What stood out just as much as the platform itself was the level of hands-on support from Lunio’s customer success team:
“I’ve always been really satisfied with the support from Lunio - especially our Account Manager Debora, who’s been incredibly flexible and proactive. It’s been a great relationship from day one.”
Oliver Smith, eCommerce & Digital Manager
While Lunio protects all of Culligan Harvey’s paid campaigns, it’s been especially critical in search, where the initial IVT problems began.
One standout moment came when Lunio helped the team identify a local competitor fraudulently clicking on their ads. Lunio provided the data needed to blacklist the offending IP and stop the attack.
“We realized where the traffic was going… and with Lunio’s help, we blacklisted that IP. We haven’t noticed that kind of activity since.”
Oliver Smith, eCommerce & Digital Manager
Culligan Harvey also used Lunio’s click export feature to compile evidence of fake leads and submit it to Google. The result? A successful refund for invalid clicks - without needing to rely on a dedicated Google account manager.
“We were able to export click logs and send them to Google. They confirmed the traffic was invalid and issued us a refund.”
— Oliver Smith, eCommerce & Digital Manager
Culligan Harvey’s paid media results significantly improved within the first month of deploying Lunio. The most notable impact of eliminating IVT was the increase in MQLs:
“If we were to remove Lunio, I can say with full confidence that MQLrate would fall again. The amount of suspicious and invalid activity Lunio removes is incredible.”
— Oliver Smith, eCommerce & Digital Manager
The below graph compares Culligan Harvey’s weekly invalid traffic rate (blue line) with the average rate seen across unprotected accounts (red line) over a 12-month period, from April 2024 to April 2025.
A clear spike in IVT begins just before October and runs through to early January - coinciding with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year sales. It’s a time of year when bot activity reliably surges across digital ad platforms.
But throughout this high-risk period, Culligan Harvey’s protected traffic remained significantly cleaner than the average unprotected business:
• Average weekly IVT rate for Culligan Harvey: 3.68%
• Average weekly IVT rate for unprotected accounts: 8.05%
By addressing invalid traffic at its source, Culligan Harvey has regained control of their paid media investment - improving campaign efficiency, boosting lead-to-demo conversion rates, and reducing time spent chasing junk leads.
With Lunio in place, the team can scale their most effective campaigns with confidence, knowing their budget is reaching real people who are ready to convert.
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