iGaming and crypto: from the first deposit to the first trade. Eighteen sources, fifty-nine countries, media plan, reporting and budget allocation as separate line items.
Media plan in 48 hoursEach direction is a separate buying team with its own platforms and its own regulation. They share one thing:media plan before launch, line-by-line reporting, transparent budget allocation. Availability of a specific source depends on the GEO and platform requirements — this is verified at the media-plan stage.
Search answers people who are already looking: a player types your brand, a category, or a competitor. It is the warmest traffic and the most regulated — in most countries you cannot run at all without certification, and that is the first thing we check, not the last.
Social gives volume and cheap reach, but almost nowhere allows direct gambling ads. What works is a permitted offer at the entry point and the target action further down: an app, content, a giveaway, a sports media product.
Mobile app inventory: large volume, low price, wildly uneven quality. Half the work is not buying but cutting the sources that deliver installs without people.
Buying through a DSP gives control over frequency, placements and lists, while native formats reach an audience that ignores banners. This is also where budget leaks fastest if exclusion lists are not kept.
A creator transfers trust an ad cannot. The cost of a mistake is higher: a bad media buy costs budget, a bad creator also costs the brand its standing with that audience.
Live streaming is the only format where the product is shown in real time, unedited. After Twitch banned unlicensed slots in 2022 the market split across platforms — and the choice of platform is now defined by the licence, not the reach.
Topical communities are an audience that already plays and already compares. You do not need to explain the product here, you need to explain how you differ from where they play today.
A store is both a traffic channel and a gatekeeper. A real-money app is published only by a licensed entity and only in a list of countries, so promotion starts by checking what can be published at all.
The only channel where the audience belongs to you or a partner rather than a platform. Cheap per contact and entirely dependent on list quality — a blast to a bought list costs you the domain.
The slowest channel and the only one that does not switch off with the budget. Players compare operators on review sites before registering — that is where the decision is made.
An exchange has a long road to the first trade: sign-up, verification, funding. Ads bring people to the start of it and they usually drop out in the middle — so a campaign is measured to the trade, not to the sign-up.
The goal is not to add users but to lift turnover. Those are different campaigns: volume comes from a small share of active traders, and the work is with them, not with funnel width.
Here the window is measured in hours, not weeks. Everything that must appear on launch day is bought and approved in advance — during the launch there is no time to negotiate.
People use an exchanger at the moment of need and compare three things: rate, speed, verification requirements. All promotion comes down to being visible at exactly that moment.
The 2024 tap-to-earn wave showed the main thing: millions in weeks is achievable, keeping them after the airdrop is not. So campaigns here are planned around what happens after the reward, not before it.
In crypto a creator answers to their audience with their audience’s money — and the audience remembers. So selection is not by reach but by what they promoted a year ago and how it ended.
For a crypto project X is not a promotion channel, it is where the project exists. An empty feed reads as an absent team, so the work here is continuous rather than campaign-based.
The most regulated direction of all. Binary options are banned for retail clients in the EU by the 2018 ESMA decision and closed in several other jurisdictions — so the country list is defined first, and only then is the budget discussed.
Pick a region on the orbit — its countries light up on the map, the list is on the right.
All regions and the source matrix
Availability of a specific source in a specific country depends on regulation and platform requirements: some need Google certification, some an operator licence, some channels are closed entirely. The exact source × country list is fixed in the media plan before signing.
Before launch we build an individual forecast for your GEO, source and budget: expected registrations, deposits, cost per FTD and a conversion corridor. Below are the market benchmarks we start from; exact numbers depend on the product and GEO.
There is no universal package: the budget is assembled individually for GEO, source, volume and KPI. The usual path istest campaign → standard → scaling, and at every step you can see what every dollar paid for.
Formats, pricing and what is inside the media plan
For your GEO and product: sources, volumes, cost-per-action forecast, platform requirements. Free and without obligation.
A registered legal entity, a contract or IO, campaign terms agreed in writing: GEOs, sources, KPIs, payment schedule.
The first weeks verify sources with small budget shares. Weak ones are switched off, strong ones get volume.
Weekly line-by-line reporting: impressions, clicks, registrations, deposits, cost per action for each source separately.
For your GEO and product: sources, volumes, cost-per-action forecast, platform requirements. Free and without obligation.
A registered legal entity, a contract or IO, campaign terms agreed in writing: GEOs, sources, KPIs, payment schedule.
The first weeks verify sources with small budget shares. Weak ones are switched off, strong ones get volume.
Weekly line-by-line reporting: impressions, clicks, registrations, deposits, cost per action for each source separately.
Small budget shares: verifying sources and cutting the weak ones.
Working volume on the sources that passed the test.
Budget growth with weekly line-by-line reporting.
Anonymised results of real campaigns: GEO → sources → budget → period → result. The numbers reconcile with the KPI corridors above — numbers that don't reconcile are the first sign of an invented case.
Half the budget went into cutting sources in the first two weeks. The remaining four weeks ran at half the starting price.
The start moved three weeks because of certification. Dates were counted from the certificate, so the weekly plan held.
The peak fell on a league round: placements were planned around the fixture list, not around convenient dates.
The first-deposit event was passed to the store from day one — the algorithm reached target cost by the end of week two.
The first two months produced almost nothing. By month six the channel delivered deposits without daily spend — which is the point of it.
Stream terms were agreed in writing before launch. Not a single broadcast had to be pulled afterwards.
Expensive per action and justified by average volume: the audience traded rather than watched.
Of 140 channels offered, 38 were selected — by views-to-subscribers, not by the seller’s rate card.
The cheapest line on the list: these people had already registered and verified, and none of that was paid for twice.
Of 4,100 domains, 3,700 went to the blacklist. The rest produced 89% of deposits.
KYC pass rate was 61%. Without that number the cost per sign-up would look twice as good and mean nothing.
22% remained on day seven. That is the real price — measured by entries it would look five times lower.
Push gave volume and almost no repeat deposits. In month two the budget shifted toward in-app.
Display produced nothing on its own, yet search converted a quarter better alongside it — so they were measured together.
A third of the trades arrived in months two and three after publication — the YouTube search tail only shows on a long window.
In the first ten days they tested seven sources and kept four. Cost per first deposit in Brazil fell from $84 to $48, with no loss in volume.
A. KovalenkoHead of Acquisition, sportsbookWe launched in-app and Telegram simultaneously in the Philippines. By week three in-app delivered 70% of deposits on half the budget share — without step-by-step funnel data we would have missed that.
S. OliveiraCMO, casino brandAuditing our active Telegram channels took two weeks instead of the promised five days — but in the end 60% of placements with inflated views were cut. Unpleasant to learn the scale of the problem, yet CPA normalised immediately.
D. PetrovAffiliate Manager, affiliate networkGoogle certification in Germany took twenty-two days. The campaign was planned from the certificate date, not our deadline, and in six weeks we got 410 FTDs at USD 174 — within the forecast.
L. AndersenGrowth Lead, sportsbookFor a casino brand in Japan we placed integrations with four YouTube creators. Search traffic from those videos kept converting ten weeks out — FTD at $127, and half arrived after the flight ended.
K. YamamotoMedia Buying Lead, casino brandReactivation of the UAE database worked — 14% returned to deposits within three weeks. But the email campaign launch was delayed ten days because of domain warm-up, and we lost part of the window around the tournament.
N. HassanHead of Retention, sportsbookThey ran programmatic buying for us across Poland and Czechia. Out of 2,800 domains, 340 made the whitelist — but those 340 delivered FTDs at $93 instead of the $150+ market rate.
R. KowalskiPartnership Manager, affiliate networkWe launched a casino brand in Colombia from scratch: paid social and in-app on a $28,000 budget. Creatives were refreshed every two weeks because TikTok burned out in ten days. Result: 640 FTDs at $44.
M. TorresCPO, casino brandBuying YouTube creators in South Korea was expensive — $143 per first trade — but the average trading volume from acquired accounts covered the cost within six weeks. Without an LTV forecast we would have killed the campaign in week three.
T. NakamuraHead of Acquisition, crypto exchangePromoting the exchanger in CIS Telegram chats brought a stream of requests, but the completed-swap rate stayed below 40% for the first two weeks. The issue was withdrawal limits, not traffic. Once the limits were raised, conversion reached 67%.
V. SokolovaGrowth Lead, exchangerIn the UAE an influencer campaign delivered 290 first trades in five weeks at $152 each. Expensive per contact, but the audience actually traded: average turnover in month one exceeded $4,000.
B. Al-FarsiCMO, crypto exchangeWe placed reviews on five comparison sites across Europe. The channel is slow — first conversions appeared after a month — but by month four the cost per verified trader was $89, and the flow did not depend on daily spend.
C. DuboisPartnership Manager, trading platformIn Argentina we collected 9,200 exchange sign-ups in four weeks. 58% passed KYC — we expected 50%. The key was checking verification rates before the media plan: two sources were cut in advance because their traffic in that GEO did not clear documents.
F. SantosMedia Buying Lead, crypto exchangeWe hit 120,000 mini-app entries in two weeks — an impressive number, but day-7 retention was 19%. We had expected at least 25%. The team warned us beforehand that retention would be the challenge, and they were right — the next flight was planned from D7, not from entries.
H. KimCPO, Web3 gameBing Ads turned out to be the second-largest source in the Netherlands — clicks 40% cheaper than Google, with nearly the same deposit conversion. In eight weeks we got 280 FTDs at USD 181.
J. van DijkHead of Acquisition, sportsbookIn Nigeria push traffic gave cheap installs, but day-7 returns were below 5%. We had to restructure the mix toward in-app — the price went up, but repeat deposits finally appeared. An expensive lesson, but a useful one.
E. MensahGrowth Lead, sportsbookIn Greece we picked 18 Telegram channels out of 90 — the criterion was simple: actual reach of recent posts, not follower count. Cost per deposit came to $74, which is very strong for Tier 2.
P. StavrosCMO, casino brandSearch campaign in Denmark — 240 FTDs at USD 192 over six weeks. Bing accounted for only 15% of volume, but its registration-to-deposit rate was 21% versus 14% for Google. Without a per-source breakdown that would be invisible.
A. LindqvistMedia Buying Lead, sportsbookThey audited crypto channels for our advertisers — out of 200 Telegram placements, 54 passed vetting. On the survivors the cost per first trade in the UK came to $187, which is very competitive for Tier-1 crypto.
O. JohanssonAffiliate Manager, affiliate networkEmail reactivation across a base of 48,000 inactive users in Mexico and Argentina. 11% returned to trading — and since they had already passed KYC, we paid nothing for verification a second time.
I. MoralesHead of Retention, crypto exchangeWallet promotion in Nigeria and Kenya via in-app and Telegram channels. The install cost next to nothing, but the real metric was day-2 return rate — 34%. That is what we optimised for, not download numbers.
W. OkaforGrowth Lead, walletA campaign on X and with crypto creators in Germany and Austria. Reach built up fast, but verification conversion was a third below the forecast — platforms required more documents than we had planned for. The outcome was still positive, but the first month was tense.
R. BergmannCMO, trading platformWe reached the top line on two rate monitors within three months — organic swap requests grew fourfold. The channel keeps running without daily spend, and that is its core advantage over paid buying.
G. AslanovHead of Acquisition, exchangerThree KOL integrations on YouTube for the Thailand market launch. First trades started in week two, but the bulk accumulated by week six — YouTube algorithms picked up the videos later than expected. Total: 310 first trades at $94.
Z. TanakaMedia Buying Lead, crypto exchangeBecause you send it against a contract, not “for traffic”: a registered legal entity, a contract or IO, GEOs, sources and KPIs agreed in writing. Budget allocation per source is visible in the weekly report; the agency fee is a separate line. We start with a test campaign on a small budget share.
The media plan takes 48 hours. After that it depends on the source: in-app, Telegram and programmatic start within days; gambling search ads require Google certification per country — one week to a month, and we plan it in from the start.
There are no fixed packages. The minimum is defined by the task: a test campaign needs enough data to statistically cut weak sources in your GEO. The media plan gives that number — for your market, not an average.
By S2S postbacks from your tracker, reconciled weekly. Discrepancies above the agreed threshold are resolved before invoicing, not after.
That is a normal test outcome: weak sources are cut within the first two weeks and their budget moves to the strong ones. That is exactly why the test is split across sources instead of poured into one channel.
It depends on the country's regulation: where the direct channel is closed, we propose compliant combinations — an app, a content landing page, a media product. What is and isn't possible in your GEO is fixed in the media plan before launch.
Yes — exchange campaigns are measured to the first trade, not the registration. For volume growth there is a separate format, Trading Volume: working with active traders rather than widening the funnel.
Yes, if we start early: the launch window is measured in hours, so every placement, creator and creative is agreed before day X. A week before is too late; a month before is just right.
By track record: what the creator promoted a year ago and how it ended for their audience. Reach comes second. The list is approved with you before buying.
You. Ad accounts, audiences and accumulated campaign data belong to the client and are handed over when the engagement ends. Statistics and media plans are never shared with third parties; NDA on request.
Describe the product, GEO and budget — we come back with a plan: sources, volumes, cost-per-action forecast and platform requirements. Free and without obligation.
