Many iGaming operators look for a CPA bidding alternative, as this model is too costly and unreliable. These are not the only reasons, by the way. We asked our Head of CPM to lay out a rivaling strategy of running iGaming ads with powerful results and lower budget risks. Tempting? Sure it is!
Hi there! My department is in charge of over 10K campaigns for top-market operators who target players worldwide, from LatAm to Asia. We’re facing a bunch of challenges these days while players become more selective and new markets appear at a roaring speed. My simple question to iGaming pros: do you still rely on CPA pricing when you need to gain more from campaigns? If so, you will need to reassess your approach. Hopefully, you will enrich your marketing with a neat and friendly tool after reading this post.
Mikhail Zhukov,
Head of CPM Advertising
When iGaming CPA bids are reasonable
Do you still rely on unpredictable CPA bidding when buying iGaming or sports traffic? This may be reasonable when:
- You advertise a new app and target to increase its installations or grow players’ signups
- You collect a subscription base. So, the conversion flow equals to a single opt-in (e.g., email)
As you may have guessed, the shorter and simpler your conversion is, the better it fits the CPA strategy. But the situation alters when it comes to complex (or hard) conversions like FTDs (first-time deposits). Why’s that? Let me explain.
When a CPA bidding alternative is a must
With CPA bidding, you pay only for conversions. You don’t know how many users have engaged and are ready to play, and you don’t know how many will stay with you after they make a deposit.
In the iGaming market, 90% of revenues come from 5–10% of players, and you can invest thousands of dollars in CPA but still not become profitable. So, what are the most common reasons?
Whether you opt for CPM or optimized CPA bidding, traffic quality remains at premium level. Streamline traffic aqcuisition with a trusted partner in iGaming industry.
1. Overheated markets & prices
Deposits and credit card submissions are considered to be the hardest conversions, only ceding the competition to COD (cash-on-delivery) offers. With so many operators and affiliate marketers willing to grab deposits, the rivalry for high-intent players is extremely high, even in new markets. There are several ways to enter new markets and boost user activity with lower spending.
2. Unpredictable LTV
Ok, you set the highest CPA bid, knock down the competition (in Tier-1 geos, this competition is truly harsh), and grab the conversions needed. Will these players stay? Or, were these “free spins” and “$100 bonus” they fell for just once? You never know unless your customer base stays stable and scalable for years, which is not possible these days.
With a high LTV (lifetime value), your CPA investments will pay off multiple times. But when players leave after their first minimal deposit, ad investment can be leveled out. I mean that investments in advertising, team wages, time spent on market research, and launching campaigns may not collectively pay off. There’s a need for a less costly solution.
3. Tons of relevant traffic are overlooked
As we could ensure, a well-targeted campaign paired with a powerful offer always attracts players. However, with CPA pricing selected at the start, you only focus on those ready to deposit right now. Hundreds of not thousands of potential customers are overlooked because of the time factor.
4. Slow decision making
And the last reason stems from the previous one: players don’t fund their accounts in seconds. It may take time to become familiar with the operator (so stay credible – don’t make these iGaming mistakes), check all terms and conditions, googling or ChatGPTeeing user reviews and ratings. They don’t decide instantly. You need a more time-resistant strategy that will allow you to wait until the decision is made.
And we’ve come closer to the solution for a dilemma: save all CPA bidding advantages, removing its challenges.
CPA Goal: the best CPA bidding alternative
CPA Goal is a bidding strategy wrapped into one smart tool. iGaming operators can save money on classic CPA bidding and apply this tool to auto-optimize CPM traffic. You don’t need any deep user analytics here.
What is CPA Goal optimization?
CPA goal allows you to achieve a certain cost per action (eCPA) or a desired number of conversions when buying massive amounts of CPM (or CPC) traffic. You still pay for impressions/clicks, and CPA Goal auto-optimizes this traffic according to a rule set.
How does a rule looks like?
- You enter the spending amount. When an ad placement reaches this amount, the system will check it to meet one of the criteria.
- Criteria: you enter either eCPA (average cost per action) or the number of conversions needed per placement.
- The rule will remove (unlink) publishers’ placements that reach the given spending amount and don’t meet your criteria.
Benefits:
- Lower spending amount as you don’t buy CPA directly,
- Better campaign longevity,
- Transparent and automated traffic optimization
- Extra data for creating blacklists or greylists,
- Massive traffic tests on new geos
You can create multiple rules for various campaigns or apply the same rule to several campaigns.
CPA Goal auto-optimization use case
Why not give the CPA goal a try? Let’s now tool works using the example of launching an iGaming campaign:
1. Getting ready
Let’s assume we decided which offer to test and set up postback tracking. These are pre-conditions for further optimization.
Next, we define the critical spending amount per placement. Let it be $20. We don’t need a placement that costs over $20.
Finally, it’s better to decide on the ad type. We will now carry on with Popunders, the most iGaming-friendly. If you’re a fan of nice ad creatives, choose Social Bar or Interstitial, but read this guide to iGaming and sports creatives first.
2. Create a rule
- Let’s jump to Adsterra. Sign up first and open the main dashboard.
- From the left sidebar menu, click Campaigns >> CPA Goal Rules.
Start creating a new rule by naming it.
You’ll then be able to apply this rule to other Adsterra campaigns.
Next, enter the critical parameters:
- Spent: the amount of spending per ad placement. Algorithms will check this placement if it hits this amount.
- Optimization parameter, or your main rule for unlinking the placement. You can choose between the number of conversions or eCPA.
- Condition: less & less or equal for conversions, more & more or equal for eCPA
Let me illustrate with an example of a rule. Here, the algorithm will unlink any advertising placement that drives less than 9 conversions and costs $50.
As you can see, rules are flexible, and you can adjust them to fit KPIs.
Let’s now create a new rule that will unlink a placement if the number of conversions is fewer than 1. So, literally, the Spent parameter will equal the cost of one conversion, but the placement can generate 5, 10, 20, or even more target actions.
I’ll hit ADD RULE to save it for our next big step, the campaign setup!
3. Create a campaign with an auto-optimization rule
Now comes the most exciting part. Let’s see how to apply CPA Goal smart rules to real traffic. Go to the Create campaign page. I’ve copied all settings from a live campaign targeting Nigeria. Players from Nigeria demonstrate a higher LTV; therefore, auto-optimized and cost-effective CPM traffic results in decent profits here.
Here’s the preset with all the settings we made for our partner:
Required settings
- Device format: Mobile + Tablets
- Traffic type: All types
- Connection type: WiFi+3G (all types)
- Ad unit & Pricing: Popunder, CPM
- Landing URL & Preview: the URL with obligatory tokens for conversion tracking
- Country: NG (Nigeria)
- Pricing (aka CPM bid): we chose the recommended price per 1,000 impressions
Finally, we set a total budget of $2,000 and jumped to the Cappings and Limit section to add daily spending limits of $200.
You may also want to use the Daily Budget Limit option. It protects from overspending when a sudden burst of traffic occurs, which is typical in the iGaming industry.
A daily limit of $200 is enough to stay competitive in spending and collect stats faster. Usually, 48 hours are enough to get valuable results.
We’ll need some additional settings in this campaign. So jump to this section and click OS Targeting. Select Android, all versions.
Our test CPM campaign with auto-optimization was launched with these exact settings. Let’s now see how to monitor and correct current campaigns.
4. Campaign monitoring and corrections
Typically, you start getting results in 24 hours but keep the campaign running for extra 24 hours to collect more data. You’re able to monitor vital stats on Adsterra, but to enable extensive analysis, use conversion trackers.
CPA and spending amount: we set $20 for critical spending to unlink placements that return fewer than one conversion. With such a straightforward rule, you can easily check if the campaign is successful.
CTR: it should be around 1%+ on Popunder ads and 2% on Social Bar. Though Social Bar is famed for making 30%+ CTRs, we’re now at the test stage, where 2% is more than OK.
CR: check if it’s around 5–10%, which is a nice and reasonable rate.
With all these details collected, you can now optimize traffic manually. Auto-optimization will carry on running and unlinking placements that suspend too much and don’t deliver conversions.
5. Manual optimization
With massive CPM traffic and auto-optimization (CPA Goal), you can manage the campaign more efficiently by making corrections based on real data. With classic CPA bidding, you would have to wait longer and spend much more.
My advice here is to copy your current campaign, add custom optimization, and launch it instead of the old one. Keep in mind that you’ll need to go through the verification stage.
- Exclude ineffective OS and browsers, streaming ad budgets to the best performers.
- Add more creatives if your Social Bar CTR is lower than 2%. With Popunders, you direct users to a landing page without designing any creatives.
Pro tip: You can add the ##BANNER_ID## token to monitor how each creative performs outside Adsterra (in your tracking system). There’s no need to add tokens to monitor creatives’ output in your Adsterra account.
Here above is a test screenshot, as I could not use the one from our advertiser’s account.
3. Increase payouts for top placements, those that send cost-effective and multiple conversions. From your stats, group data by ad placements and add filters to find the most effective ones (CTR, conversions, eCPA filters).
Pro tip: To track placement IDs outside Adsterra, add the ##PLACEMENT_ID## token to your landing page URL.
4. Filter data by critical parameters and find the star performers. Copy IDs (download a .CSV file for ease of use). Next, jump to the Advanced settings section and add IDs to the Custom Bid tool. Select a higher CPM bid to get more traffic from these sources.
6. Campaign scaling
My teammates have shared a super-friendly guide gain more traffic on CPA campaigns. Therefore, I’ll only outline the main strategies for CPM strategy paired with the CPA goal.
- Earlier, we set the critical spending amount to “$20,” and the minimum number of conversions was set to “1”. So, 48 hours after launching the test, you can evaluate if this spend is enough. You can increase your daily budget if you see many unlinked placements or the CPA sticks at $20.
- Add more geos if you’re allowed. Copy the campaign, estimate bids, and launch the new ones with the same settings for a Latin American country or one from Eastern Europe.
- Add more creatives to boost traffic
- If you haven’t done it at the start, allow all traffic types (mainstream + non-mainstream)
- Keep an eye on sporting events that burst with conversions before the main sporting events and increase your bid a little.
There you go! You have a viable tactic to try out Adsterra traffic with the lowest risks possible and an exceptional opportunity to profit.
Bottom line
Our job was to find the best alternative to CPA bidding for iGaming marketing. Job completed! I hope you’ll add a couple of hacks to your strategy. Keep track of data, remember about tests, and hit the best ROI possible!
