How European Camping Group Expands its Market-leading,
International Presence with CHEQ

The Challenge

European Camping Group (ECG) is the market leader in premium camping holidays, operating hundreds of destinations and several brands across Europe. For ECG, growth at scale is mission-critical, but as Head of Performance Marketing Ryan Skidmore highlights, scale comes with risk and disruption from bad bots, competitors, and fake users who drain campaign spend, pollute insights in analytics data, and derail optimization efforts.

“The more and more we become famous, the more and more we’re likely to get targeted by bad bots and other maleficent actors,” says Skidmore.

As an international brand, ECG operates a “think globally, act locally” model that prioritizes a centralized strategy with local execution across teams in the UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, and Poland. Unfortunately, invalid traffic muddied performance and customer behavior data essential for uncovering marketing-specific insights where they’re investing heavily in brand awareness and acquisition efforts.

Skidmore’s initial awakening came at a marketing conference where he learned about industry invalid traffic rates between 5-10%. “I just went away and calculated what’s 5% of our total media spend,” he recalls.

After reviewing his initial analysis, Skidmore knew it was time to act. “We did some tests on a few of our big domains to show what’s the baseline invalid rate,” Skidmore explains. This data-driven approach made internal stakeholder buy-in straightforward: “It was quite easy for me to build a business case to say at whatever the percentage is for each market, this is our potential lost media spend and if we reinvested that at a 10x, it’s an opportunity loss of however many millions.”

The Solution

With sights set on expanding paid marketing protection beyond an UK and Ireland test and recent company acquisitions, ECG knew CHEQ was the tool needed to support aggressive international growth. CHEQ Acquisition now blocks millions of bad actors and fake users each year and ECG reclaims significant budget to fuel its 10X ROI campaign goals. CHEQ has become core infrastructure enabling ECG to expand its market share while safeguarding performance and insights.

“[CHEQ] offered unique functionality in terms of cookie-based blocking that [competitors] couldn’t do.” Skidmore explains. “Plus the really simple plug-and-play nature. These tools are pretty easy to set up and you just let them do their thing in the background.”

Perhaps just as valuable for busy marketing leaders like Ryan Skidmore, CHEQ delivers consistent results without constant management. “The real benefit of the solution is we don’t need to speak with you very often. Not because we don’t want to, but because we don’t have to,” Skidmore explains. “When you’re juggling a million different platforms and people, sometimes it’s nice just to have something that gives you an ROI that you don’t have to keep messing with.”

For Skidmore, his experience throughout the ECG and CHEQ partnership became the catalyst to reframe fraud protection as more than a tactical tool—it was a marker of maturity. “You can’t consider yourself an advanced, mature digital business if you don’t have fraud protection in place.”