Paid Social Traffic for iGaming: 7,375 deposits at $9.89 in 30 days [Case Study]

Paid Social traffic might cost more than other formats. But, time and again, it proves to pay off. This is the fourth time we’ve run a Paid Social test on an iGaming offer, and here the premium CPM produced a cheaper deposit than Popunder.

Let’s take a look. 

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About the Campaign Setup

The goal of the campaign was to conduct the cleanest A/B test possible and answer the question:

So, there were several rules set for the test:

• The same offer;
• The same campaign settings including the device and pricing model;
• The same period;
• The same GEO.

The only variable was the traffic type: our partner compared Paid Social and Popunder on the same setup and measured only the cost of the deposit. So, nothing could affect the result except the traffic format.

Here are the settings, briefly:

Traffic types compared	Paid social vs popunder
GEO	A single GEO in Southeast Asia
Device	Mobile – 100% of volume, Android as the main OS
Vertical	iGaming, deposit model (registration → deposit)
Pricing	CPA Goal
Period	30 days, July 15 – August 13, 2026
Volume	58M impressions across the whole campaign; 46,160 registrations and 24,629 deposits in the tested formats
Spend under test	$283,498 total, of which $72,968 was spent on Paid Social

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The Campaign Flow

When we looked at cost per registration, there’s no significant difference between the two traffic types:

Traffic format	Registrations	Cost per registration	CPM
Paid social	12,438	$5.87	$17.03
Popunder	33,722	$6.24	$11.70

So paid social costs 1.5× more per impression, and almost the same per registration. So, if our partner had stopped the test at this point, they would have barely concluded that paid social was worth the premium.

However, the difference became significant at the next step: the deposit. Of everyone who registered, 59.3% went on to deposit on Paid Social, while only 51.2% deposited on Popunder.

Paid Social brings people ready to interact with the ads – and that’s why the premium CPM pays off at the deposit event.

So, the numbers look as follows:

Which is 18.9% cheaper than Popunder. Take a hundred registrations from each, and it’s easy to see why: on paid social they cost $587 and produced 59 deposits, on popunder – $624 and 51 deposits. Almost the same cost, but brings more paying users.

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The Results and the Full Comparison

Within the 30-day test, Paid Social produced 7,375 deposits – 30% of all the deposits, 19% of the tested impressions. Popunder delivered more deposits in total, but only because it had four times the volume. From the same amount of traffic, paid social produced nearly twice as many. 

What’s more, this gap widened across the test: in the first half, Paid Social’s deposit was 8.2% cheaper than Popunder’s; in the second – 26.3% cheaper.

It happened because the share of registrations that became deposits climbed from 51.7% to 66.1% on Paid Social, but stayed flat on Popunder: 51.0% to 51.3%.

Here is a full comparison table:

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The Takeaway

Paid Social cost more per impression, but it converted 1.8× as many deposits per thousand impressions, on a deposit model that made the deposit 19% cheaper than popunder.

However, it doesn’t mean that one traffic source is inherently better than the other, or that you always need to compare and choose between them.

Oleksandr Shovkun, Sales Team Leader at PropellerAds: