As KURU Footwear expanded beyond bottom-of-funnel acquisition, the team needed confidence that increased spend would not introduce waste. Lunio helped them scale into awareness channels while improving traffic quality and protecting performance, especially across branded search on Google & Bing.
Key stats:
- 32% decrease in invalid traffic rate in first 90 days (Nov 2024 vs Feb 2025)
- 30% increase in revenue per $1 spent on branded search (2024 vs 2025)
- 50% increase in Session Growth across branded search (2024 vs 2025)
- 25% decrease in cost-per-session across branded search (2024 vs 2025)
KURU is a direct-to-consumer footwear brand focused on foot pain relief . For years, growth was driven almost entirely by bottom-of-funnel efforts, capturing existing demand efficiently.
In 2023, the team began to scale investment in awareness channels to build demand at the top of the funnel. We spoke with Tanner Parsons, Paid Search and Shopping Manager, on how he worked with the team at Lunio to scale this shift as efficiently as possible.
The risk of scaling
Expanding into awareness introduced new risks. Channels like YouTube, Display and Demand Gen increased reach, but also raised concerns around traffic quality. As ad spend scaled, efficiency started to drop, causing average CPA to slowly creep up throughout 2023 and 2024.
In H2 2024, Tanner and his team began to suspect traffic quality issues coming from the new mid-to-upper funnel channels they introduced into their media mix. And on that basis, they knew further investigation was warranted to combat growing inefficiency.
Why KURU chose Lunio
Tanner and the KURU team first trialled another invalid traffic solution, but after a brief trial period, they weren’t impressed with the results for the proposed subscription cost. At this point, the team were aware they were exposed to some degree of bot traffic, but it wasn’t a major focus at the time, given the focus on bottom-funnel demand capture.
In 2024, Tanner started regularly attending Lunio’s monthly webinars, which focus on helping marketers drive greater spend efficiency across a wide variety of different channels and campaign types. Tanner said the quality of the guest experts and insights from these webinars played a key role in his decision to request a traffic audit with Lunio.
“My initial trust in Lunio came from the webinars. Lunio was already bringing value to the table with the quality of guest experts and the usefulness of the advice provided.
It’s clear to me that Lunio is genuinely invested in helping the wider paid media community through their content. And that’s what made me get in touch to set up an initial traffic audit to help investigate the issues we were seeing with inefficient spend."Tanner Parsons, Paid Search & Shopping Manager, KURU Footwear
Getting started
The initial Lunio traffic audit in November 2024 revealed an average invalid traffic rate of 6.48% across Google and Bing. But a more granular breakdown of the data revealed KURU’s primary Google Branded Shopping Campaign had a much higher average IVT rate of 19.85%.
With IVT rates of more than 8% recorded across several campaigns during the audit phase, it was clear commercial ROI could be gained by using Lunio to reduce exposure. Tanner and the team valued the straightforward tracking template setup process, which required little ongoing management.
By the end of February 2025, three months after Lunio protection was first enabled, KURU’s average invalid traffic rate fell to 4.38% – representing an overall 32% reduction in fake clicks. This proved to be an early indicator of the further efficiency improvements that were made throughout the rest of 2025.
“Invalid traffic can eat into your ad budget without you even knowing. And as you scale, the commercial impact starts to have meaningful negative consequences.
For mid-size and larger companies, not addressing it is just wasting money… At the end of the day, if you’re driving junk traffic, it’s garbage in, garbage out.”Tanner Parsons, Paid Search & Shopping Manager, KURU Footwear
How Lunio fuels more efficient revenue growth
Lunio now runs continuously in the background, monitoring paid traffic and driving down invalid activity as spend scales. This allows KURU to expand across Google’s full inventory range with greater confidence.
Clear dashboard reporting and regular check-ins with their dedicated Lunio Account Manager, Debora Roberto, make it easy for Tanner and his team to spot trends and respond accordingly.
“Attribution is always messy, but we have more confidence using Google’s full inventory knowing Lunio is cleaning the data. We can actually compare channels and reallocate budget intelligently when we see certain campaigns driving low-quality traffic.
And having Debora there to review our traffic data and make strategic optimization recommendations has been a big help.”Tanner Parsons, Paid Search & Shopping Manager, KURU Footwear
The results
As KURU continued to increase ad spend throughout 2025, traffic quality moved in the right direction. And downstream improvements on key metrics started to become clear, especially across branded search on Google and Bing.
- 32% decrease in invalid traffic rate in first 90 days (Nov 2024 vs Feb 2025)
- 30% increase in revenue per $1 spent on branded search (2024 vs 2025)
- 50% increase in Session Growth across branded search (2024 vs 2025)
- 25% decrease in cost-per-session across branded search (2024 vs 2025)
Delivering traffic quality insurance
As KURU continues to grow, Lunio remains a permanent part of their paid media stack. This gives the team confidence to scale without second-guessing traffic quality.
With cleaner inputs, the team can move faster and focus on budget allocation decisions rather than getting bogged down in the weeds of manual traffic validation.
“We tried it. It worked. It’s cost-effective, and the ongoing relationship matters.
Based on the results we’ve seen in 2025, Lunio is now an essential component of our paid media strategy.”Tanner Parsons, Paid Search & Shopping Manager, KURU Footwear
