What this covers
How do you buy Google Ads in iGaming?
Search and PMax are run where the licence and the platform still allow gambling creatives. Queries are grouped by intent to deposit, not by vanity brand terms. Negative lists are treated as a living asset because one leaked query can spend a week of budget on bonus hunters.
What does Meta look like when conversion APIs are required?
Meta is useful when the event map is server-side and the creative can state the offer the market allows. Without a deposit event that matches, the algorithm optimises for the last thing it can see, which is rarely an FTD.
When is native and programmatic worth a square?
Native and open-web programmatic fill markets where walled gardens are thin or banned. They need landing pages that load, a frequency cap that respects bonus abuse, and a CPA target that includes the publisher's actual quality, not the network average.
How are landing pages tied to the media buy?
Each campaign family has a lander family. Offer, language, payment cue and licence mark match the traffic source. A shared homepage is not a landing page.
What is the test budget for a new market?
A test is sized to produce a statistically honest FTD CPA, not to 'get presence'. If the spend cannot buy enough deposits to read the number, the square stays empty.
How it's measured
| KPI | What it tells you | When we act on it |
|---|---|---|
| FTD CPA | Cost to acquire a first-time depositing player. | Act when it breaks the payback window for two consecutive weeks. |
| FTD rate | Deposits over unique clickers who reach the cashier. | Act when the lander or the geo mix shifts the rate without a bid change. |
| Payback days | Days until media cost is returned in NGR. | Act when D30 NGR cannot cover CPA even after CRM. |
| Bonus cost per FTD | Promotional spend hiding inside a 'good' CPA. | Act when bonus cost is doing the converting, not the media. |
What the first 90 days look like
- Days 1–14: event map, account access, creative and lander inventory, geo and licence constraints written down.
- Days 15–30: campaigns live at test spend. Daily checks on broken events, not on ROAS screenshots.
- Days 31–60: kill sources that cannot hit a provisional CPA. Shift budget to the two or three that can.
- Days 61–90: lock a target CPA per market, document the creative IDs that produced FTDs, and decide whether the square grows or shrinks.
Common failure modes
Optimising to registration
Platforms will happily scale sign-ups. In iGaming a registration without a deposit is a cost centre with a nice dashboard. If the conversion event is not FTD, the algorithm is not doing this job.
One lander for six geos
A .com homepage in English with a global jackpot is not a market entry. Payment methods, licence strips and offer legality have to match the click. Otherwise CPA is a random number.
Scaling before match rate exists
Doubling budget on a pixel that sees half the deposits trains the platform on the wrong people. Attribution has to be in the same 90-day plan as the media, which is why paid acquisition at MOTIV always links into analytics and creative production.
Related: attribution that still sees the deposit after the browser drops the cookie and creative built for the advertising rules of each market. Up to the six iGaming marketing services on one allocation map.