iGaming · segment

Sportsbooks

Sports betting follows the event calendar: peak demand lasts days rather than months, and ad buying is planned around the fixture list. Google issues a gambling ad certificate per country, and the review period runs from one week to a month.

2core sources

5funnel steps

4typical mistakes

48 hmedia plan

Sources

Where this segment starts

01 · Paid search

PPC / Paid Search

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.

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02 · Social platforms

Paid Social

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.

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Funnel

The path to the target action

Ad clickCTR 1,5–4%Format-dependent: search yields 3–4%, native 0.8–1.5%, push below one percent. An abnormally high CTR on push is a reason to audit the source, not to celebrate.

Registration3–12%From click to a completed form. Conversion is higher on Tier-1 where the audience is accustomed to online forms; lower on Tier-3 and strongly affected by the number of fields.

KYC / verification60–85%Share of registrants who confirm documents. A drop at this step is solved not by advertising but by verification speed and interface usability on the operator side.

First deposit8–25%Registration-to-first-top-up conversion. This is the campaign calculation anchor: everything above is acquisition cost, everything below is retention.

Repeat deposit30–55%Share who return with a top-up within 30 days. This number separates a source that brought players from one that brought bonus hunters.

Availability

Where these sources are open

Regions are sorted by how many of the segment’s sources are open in them. Inside a region the rules differ by country — that is settled in the media plan.

Source	CIS	Tier 2	Tier 3	Tier 1	LATAM	Europe	APAC	MENA
PPC / Paid Search	Available	Conditional	Available	Conditional	Conditional	Conditional	Conditional	Closed
Paid Social	Available	Available	Conditional	Conditional	Conditional	Conditional	Conditional	Closed

Full source × region matrix

Careful

Where budget gets lost

Mistake 01

Certification delays the launch

Google approves gambling ads country by country, tying each application to the operator licence. Review ranges from a week to a full month. Until the certificate is issued, search ads are unavailable, and the entire media plan recalculates from the approval date.

Mistake 02

Creatives blocked on content

A slot machine image, a promise of winnings or a bonus mention — each violation pulls the ad, and repeat offences lock the ad account. The longest-lived creative is one that does not show the product head-on.

Mistake 03

Affiliates hijack brand queries

The operator's own affiliates buy its brand keywords in search, and the operator pays for a click it would have received without ads. Without continuous auction monitoring this cost is hidden — in the report it looks like cheap converting traffic.

Every mistake in both industries

Launches