How Collegis partnered with CHEQ to help institutions save millions in ad spend by blocking bot traffic through real-time traffic protection.
In today’s highly competitive higher education environment, digital marketing is vital for driving enrollment. But as institutions invest more heavily in online advertising, hidden threats like bots and click farms can silently drain budgets and distort performance data.
To help its partners safeguard precious marketing spend, Collegis Education partnered with CHEQ, a leader in go-to-market security, to help our clients mitigate fake clicks, protect their ad spend, and boost conversion quality. The results were clear: nearly $2.2 million saved and over 216,000 invalid visits blocked across partner institutions in 2024.
Despite strong strategies and creative execution, Collegis observed troubling patterns across higher education partner campaigns:
High bounce rates paired with low conversions, indicating poor engagement
Inflated click-through metrics driven by non-human traffic and malicious bots
Budgets wasted on unqualified or fraudulent interactions that offered no real enrollment value
Left unchecked, these issues threatened not only marketing ROI but also the accuracy of enrollment attribution and the integrity of performance data. Over time, this invisible ad waste risked undermining leadership confidence in digital campaigns and reducing the impact of future marketing investments.
To counter these challenges, Collegis implemented CHEQ Acquisition, a cybersecurity-grade traffic protection tool that proactively detects and blocks invalid traffic (IVT) in real time.
Key components of the solution included:
By combining Collegis’ enrollment marketing expertise with CHEQ’s technology, partners could focus their investments on authentic prospective students.
The impact was both measurable and meaningful. Beyond the $2.2 million saved, Collegis delivered significant wins for our higher ed partners by safeguarding paid media campaigns from invalid traffic. These outcomes didn’t just protect budgets. They protected the quality of enrollment submissions, improved attribution accuracy, and gave marketing leaders greater confidence in their data.
CHEQ’s partnership with Collegis is not a one-time fix. It’s a core component of our ongoing enrollment optimization strategy. As bots and fraudsters evolve, so too must our defense. We continue to work with CHEQ to refine threat detection, educate clients on traffic quality metrics, and optimize ad placements based on verified performance data.
This case also underscores the importance of going beyond surface-level metrics. Impressions and clicks only matter if they come from the right users, and Collegis ensures that’s the case.
For higher education institutions navigating tight budgets and complex enrollment funnels, every ad dollar must count. By proactively filtering invalid traffic with CHEQ, Collegis has helped its partners safeguard their investments, increase ROI, and focus on what matters most: engaging real students.
Interested in learning how traffic validation and real-time protection could boost your enrollment marketing? Let’s talk about how Collegis can help your institution achieve more with less.
Ready to protect your ad spend and drive real results? Connect with Collegis to see how our data-driven strategies can maximize every marketing dollar.
CHEQ is trusted by more than 15,000 companies — from the Fortune 50 to emerging disruptors — to enable and protect each critical touchpoint in the evolving, human-AI customer journey. Powered by the only integrated Traffic, Threat, and Identity Intelligence Engine, CHEQ distinguishes legitimate users from bad actors — human, AI agent, or bot — and, in real-time, delivers granular, context-specific insights to marketing, commerce, and security platforms. With a best-in-class <0.009% false positive rate, brands can confidently engage, transact, and thrive in the AI Engagement Era.