Eight ways to lose a budget

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.

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.

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.

Click injection and click spam attribute organic installs to a paid channel. A source that costs three times less than the market is most often cheap for exactly that reason. Verified by comparing the organic share before launch and during the campaign, plus D1 and D7 retention.

An exchange accepting users from a country today may close sign-ups tomorrow. The permitted-jurisdiction list is cross-checked before every launch, not once at onboarding — otherwise budget flows where registration is already closed.

A cost-per-registration report looks good until the share who reach verification is counted. At a 50 percent KYC pass rate the real cost per target action is double what the report states.

Wash trading and self-deals inflate turnover on paper. Spotted by unique addresses per unit of volume: when one address generates an abnormal share of turnover, the reported figure does not correspond to real users.

Mentioning returns, APY or payback guarantees in ad copy violates platform policies and, in many jurisdictions, the law. Google, Meta and Apple pull such ads without warning; repeat cases lead to account lockout.