Technology Spotlight
A conversation with Matt Sutton, Chief Operating Officer at TrafficGuard brought to you by Ultimate Asset
Matt Sutton, Chief Operating Officer at TrafficGuard
“You cannot optimise growth if you are not looking at the right metrics.“
What is TrafficGuard’s elevator pitch?
TrafficGuard is an advertising verification platform that detects and prevents invalid traffic in real time for performance marketing advertisers. We help businesses ensure their marketing budgets are spent on real users, real intent, and real outcomes. Our platform provides full-funnel transparency and independently verified metrics from a trusted third party. By reducing wasted spend and restoring confidence in marketing data, TrafficGuard improves return on ad spend. This enables more efficient growth and strengthens LTV:CAC from existing customers.
What business problem are you trying to solve?
Digital advertisers have traditionally relied on the platforms they buy from to verify that their advertising reaches genuine users, with real intent, and delivers incremental value. Over time, it has become clear that platform-reported metrics are often optimised to maximise perceived performance and market value, rather than provide independent truth.
This has created a structural trust problem across the industry. As a result, advertisers lose billions each year to fraud, invalid traffic, and low-quality placements that inflate metrics while destroying real performance. The challenge is not just the loss itself, but the lack of visibility into where it occurs and the inability to prevent it.
TrafficGuard solves this by providing full-funnel transparency and real-time prevention, enabling businesses to ensure their advertising is genuinely incremental and delivers maximum return on ad spend.
What sets TrafficGuard apart from competitors? What is your unique selling proposition?
We operate across performance marketing channels including Google PPC, Meta, mobile app advertising, and affiliate marketing – environments where advertiser investment continues to grow, yet independent verification and embedded protection remain limited. Within this domain, our differentiation lies in the depth and granularity of the data we provide, combined with the precision of our prevention capabilities.
TrafficGuard delivers unparalleled visibility across the full funnel, capturing granular user-level and engagement-level data that is not available elsewhere. This enables advertisers to identify precisely where invalid traffic occurs, how it behaves, and why it impacts performance. Using these insights, advertisers can apply highly targeted, custom prevention rules to eliminate waste and maximise efficiency without compromising scale.
Finally, as COO, I am particularly proud of the level of customer service we provide. Our clients receive bespoke reporting, in-depth analysis, and direct support from a team of performance marketing experts who understand their channels, goals, and constraints. TrafficGuard is built by performance marketers, for performance marketers.
Who is your primary target audience? What are their needs and pain points?
We work with performance advertisers, either directly through leadership and in-house marketing teams, or via our preferred agency partners. Their core challenge is driving growth and retention as efficiently as possible – KPIs that translate directly into business performance and long-term valuation.
In practice, this means addressing a set of consistent pain points:
- Translating strategy into measurable results
- Scaling acquisition without losing control or efficiency
- Making capital and execution decisions based on trusted, real data
- Maximising LTV:CAC across channels and customer cohorts
How does TrafficGuard solve these need states and fill the gap in the market? What value do you bring?
TrafficGuard protects media spend at the source, in real time.
By identifying and preventing invalid traffic as it occurs, we eliminate wasted spend, restore signal integrity, and give advertisers confidence that their data reflects genuine user behaviour and incremental business outcomes. The value we bring lies in the combination of proprietary technology and deep performance marketing expertise. Our platform delivers independent, actionable truth, while our teams help advertisers turn that insight into better decisions, stronger economics, and sustainable growth.
Describe your company culture.
Our culture is ambitious, innovative, and data-driven. We rely on real data, machine learning, and increasingly AI to expose wasted spend that advertisers were previously unaware of. As a business, we set extremely high standards and pursue aggressive goals as we continue our global rollout and respond to growing market demand for these tools.
None of this is possible without exceptional people. We are very focused on ensuring we have the right talent and place a strong emphasis on ownership, curiosity, and accountability. I have always believed that culture is not something you design or declare – it is the derivative of consistent behaviours. How we make decisions, how we treat customers, and how we hold ourselves accountable to these goals is what ultimately defines our culture.
What are the most common misconceptions about TrafficGuard or sector within technology?
One of the most common misconceptions is that invalid traffic is a solved or marginal problem, and that advertisers can rely on a single platform as a source of truth to understand who is engaging with their advertising, where it happens, and when it occurs.
A second misconception is that invalid traffic is purely about fraud. In reality, advertisers should be thinking far more broadly, in line with the MRC definition, which includes advertising activity that may come from real users but does not contribute to incremental growth.
For example, does it serve a business to repeatedly pay to engage the same user across multiple placements if they are already a customer and would have converted anyway?
If advertising budgets are disproportionately reaching existing customers, it becomes extremely difficult to grow the customer base or improve LTV:CAC. In practice, invalid traffic continues to evolve alongside platforms, automation, and AI, becoming more opaque as digital advertising grows more complex.
In today’s macroeconomic environment and increasingly competitive markets, protecting traffic quality is no longer optional – it is fundamental to efficient growth and sustainable performance.
What are some of the key consumer and industry macro and micro economic trends impacting your business?
Our tailwinds are driven by a combination of macro and micro trends across the digital advertising ecosystem.
- Growing recognition among advertisers that first-party platform metrics are inherently self-serving
- A resulting decline in trust across the advertising ecosystem
- Increased complexity across performance marketing channels
- The rise of smart bidding and automated optimisation, reducing advertiser control and transparency
- Lower tolerance for wasted spend and greater scrutiny on marketing ROI and unit economics in a tighter macroeconomic environment
- Increased acceptance and demand for independent third-party verification within performance marketing
When I joined TrafficGuard five years ago, I believed that performance marketing verification would become a standard part of every CMO’s toolkit.
That shift is now well underway, and I am genuinely proud of the role TrafficGuard is playing in helping make independent verification a core part of modern performance marketing.
What are your predictions for the remainder of this year?
Advertisers will continue to shift focus from chasing scale to protecting efficiency. Tools that improve signal quality and eliminate waste will move from “nice to have” to essential infrastructure within the performance marketing stack.
Invalid traffic solutions will increasingly be recognised as performance levers, not security add-ons. Large language models will play an increasingly important role in interpreting complex data and informing more adaptive, intelligent prevention strategies.
One statement or piece of advice the industry should be thinking about this year?
You cannot optimise growth if you are not looking at the right metrics and you do not have all of the data you are optimising against.
