Media Spend Verification
Case Study: How Verified Human Delivery Produced a 28X Result for Travel Republic
Same creative, same pricing, same web flow. The only variable was who saw the ads — and the return moved from 4X to 28X.
By Will Harnden ·
The number on our homepage — a 28X return — comes from a controlled trial with a leading online travel agent, Travel Republic. Here’s how it was built, and why the result holds up.
The trial design
We ran a clean, like-for-like test. A business-as-usual control group used the travel agent’s standard media approach. A trial group used identical copy, identical pricing and an identical web flow — the only variable was how the audience was selected and verified. That isolation is what makes the outcome credible: nothing changed except who saw the ads.
How the return compounded
The uplift didn’t come from one silver bullet; it stacked, layer by layer. Filtering to a high-intent prospect audience delivered the first step-change in return. Removing erroneous devices and geographies multiplied it again. Stripping out machine traffic and bots added more. Then campaign design, disciplined media buying and real-time optimisation — shifting budget to the hardest-working executions — compounded the effect further.
Refining the initial audience alone drove a large multiple of the control’s return; each subsequent filter and optimisation layer built on the last. Cumulatively, the trial group moved from a 4X return to 28X.
Why it matters
Every pound in the trial bought the same creative and the same offer as the control. The difference in return came entirely from making sure the money reached real, high-intent humans instead of bots, duplicates and the wrong locations. That’s the whole thesis: verified human delivery isn’t a nice-to-have metric — it’s the lever that moved return sevenfold. And because we prove it with a low-cost pilot against your own control group, you don’t have to take the number on trust.
It’s worth stressing what didn’t change: the creative, the price and the web flow were held constant precisely so the result couldn’t be waved away as a better ad or a cheaper offer. Isolate the audience, verify the humans, and the return follows. That’s not a one-off — it’s the repeatable mechanism behind the headline number, and it’s exactly what a pilot on your own account is designed to reproduce.