How $17,523 on Paid Social with iGaming Offer Bought 15,091 Target Actions at $1.16 Each
We continue our Paid Social Traffic series! This time, we’ll show how our partner paid 3.5× more per impression than with pop traffic – but walked away with target actions 38% cheaper and 2.9× more of them.
Same offers, same 30 days, same platform, but here’s what Paid Social did differently.
The Campaign Settings and Flow
Our partner ran a CPA offer with a PWA funnel: preland → PWA install → target action inside the app. The campaign ran on CPA Goal, with the install set as the goal. They ran two formats at once: Popunder and Paid Social.
Here’s the setup:
- Offer type: CPA, iGaming
- Pricing: CPA Goal
- Format: Paid Social, Popunder
- Funnel: PWA – prelander, then PWA install, then iGaming product
- GEO: mix
- Device: mobile, Android
- Schedule: 24/7
- Spend (on Paid Social): $17,523
- Volume: 183K offer impressions
- Period: 30 days, June 10 – July 9
So, the flow looked like this in a nutshell:
The Campaign Flow
Bought on CPA Goal
They named a price per install. The system looked for traffic at that price.
Ignored conversion 1
Installs cost nearly the same in every zone. So this number showed nothing.
Looked at conversion 2
What users did inside the app. Only real users get that far.
Cut the expensive zones
Action costs too much? Zone off. That was the only rule.
With CPA Goal, you name the price you want to pay for the conversion, and the system delivers at that price. However, the partner wanted to judge on the second conversion instead: the action after the install – which obviously happens if the users are real. So which format shows better results here?
Long story short, Paid Social did: the target action came in at $1.16 against $1.87 on Popunder. Meanwhile, not every zone inside Paid Social performed the same: some delivered target actions right at the price they wanted, others way above it.
This is how the winning combination was found: the Paid Social format plus the zones inside it that hit the target cost per second conversion.
Zone Optimization and Scaling
After finding this winning combination, they poured more budget into it, but stayed inside Paid Social instead of chasing new traffic types. And they distributed their spend so that the biggest part went to the strongest zones.
After this, the conversion density held, and the price per target action sat at $1.16 for the full 30 days without drifting. It proved these were genuinely converting zones, not just a handful of lucky ones that die the moment you push volume through them.
Results
It turned out that Popunder bought far more impressions for the money, but it takes far more of them to get one action. Paid Social converts densely enough to pay back its premium: 38% cheaper per target action and 2.9× the volume:
Why does it happen? It’s the nature of the format: Paid Social ads run inside social feeds, where people come to browse and interact. So the ad doesn’t interrupt their scrolling and tapping, but it becomes part of it. Also, traffic comes from supply partners with their own custom setups and carefully built user journeys, so these users are among the most engaged you can buy.
Main Takeaways
- Paid social can turn out more expensive on CPM and converts denser.
- The target action came in 38% cheaper than with Pop traffic.
- The main pattern: you pay a premium for audience quality, and the premium pays for itself on offers where you’re paid for deep events: deposits, installs plus an action, registrations that have to be real. If your payout depends on what the user does after the click, the higher CPM is not the number to optimize.
Oleksandr Shovkun, Sales Team Leader at PropellerAds: A high CPM on Paid Social isn’t a reason to walk away – it’s simply what a better audience costs, so build it into your bidding strategy from the start. Just don’t judge this traffic by the conversion you set as the goal: the system aims for the same price everywhere, so all the zones look alike. Set up a second event, compare zones by that, and cut the ones where it costs too much. On offers that pay for something simple – a click or an easy lead – the higher CPM has nothing to earn back.
And this is not the first time a high CPM turned out to be worth paying:
To Sum Up
Paid Social isn’t the cheapest option, but it was never supposed to be. It’s the one that gets you the action. If your offer pays for something deeper than a click: a deposit, a real registration, an install that leads somewhere.
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