How Social Traffic Type Brought 34% More Registrations Per 1000 Impressions [Case Study]
One in six impressions. One in four registrations. Same campaign, same week.
If you’re running iGaming registration campaigns on PropellerAds Onclick and haven’t tested Social Traffic as a separate segment yet, this case study is worth your attention. We pulled 7 days of real data from a live registration campaign in Nigeria – licensed iGaming brand, Social Traffic only – and the numbers tell a pretty clear story.
Let’s get into it.
Key Takeaways
- Social Traffic was 17.3% of impressions – but delivered 23.3% of registrations and 24.5% of revenue
- Registration efficiency: 9.91 per 1,000 impressions for Social vs. 7.37 for the full campaign average (+34.5%)
- Revenue per 1,000 impressions: $4.78 for Social vs. $3.39 campaign-wide (+41%)
- Running Social Traffic as a separate campaign segment gives cleaner data for zone-level optimization and bid adjustments
Nigeria’s iGaming Market: Why Every Percentage Point of Efficiency Counts
Nigeria is the #1 iGaming market in Africa. The total market is worth an estimated $3.5 billion, with 60 million active players – 86% of them on mobile. According to iGaming Afrika’s market analysis, 174 brands are competing for roughly 12.2 million new players a month, the market grew 61% year over year, and the competitive earning baseline sits at $659M.
Nigeria: Africa’s #1 iGaming Market
Key stats for affiliates & media buyers
Total market value
$3.5B
Estimated total market size
YoY growth
Year-over-year market growth
Active players
60M
Total players in market
Monthly opps
12.2M
Acquisition opportunities
Earning baseline
$659M
Competitive earning baseline
Mobile share of active players
Active competing brands
174
Brands fighting for market share
Those are big numbers. What they mean operationally: the opportunity is massive, but so is the competition for each registered user. When one traffic segment delivers 34% more registrations per 1000 impressions than your campaign average, that difference compounds fast.
What Social Traffic Type Actually Is
Quick explainer if you haven’t used it yet. Social Traffic is a targeting subtype within PropellerAds’ Onclick/Popunder format. When you enable it in your campaign setup on the Self-Service Platform (SSP), your ads only show in zones where the user arrived from a social network – think Facebook or Instagram – right before landing on the publisher’s page.
The difference from standard Onclick: it’s all about where the user came from. A regular Onclick user might have arrived from Google, a bookmarked site, or a content feed. A Social Traffic user followed a link from inside their social feed. That single-click difference in origin has a surprisingly consistent downstream effect on how they behave when they hit your offer.
And no, this isn’t the same as advertising on Facebook or Instagram directly. You’re running on PropellerAds inventory at Onclick pricing, without the creative restrictions, minimum spends, or account policy headaches that come with social platforms. Same audience pool, different rules.
Tip from PropellerAds: Social Traffic is available as a traffic type option when setting up an Onclick/Popunder campaign in the PropellerAds SSP. You can run it as part of a RON (Run of Network) campaign or set it up as a dedicated campaign to measure performance separately – the latter makes optimization a lot cleaner.
The Campaign: iGaming Brand, Direct Registration, Nigeria, One Week
The campaign here is a direct registration campaign for a licensed iGaming operator in Nigeria. Conversion = completed new account signup. Users go straight to the registration page with no pre-lander.
It ran on Onclick in a Run of Network configuration – no zone restrictions at launch. Social Traffic was one segment within the broader delivery. Seven days, live campaign, real numbers:
Here’s the full picture:
Social Traffic was 17% of impressions. It produced 23% of registrations and 24% of revenue. The bottom two rows are where it gets interesting.
Why Do Social Traffic Users Convert Better?
When someone clicks a link in their Instagram or Facebook feed and lands on a publisher page, they’re in an active browsing state. They made a decision to follow the content. That’s a different energy than the user who opened a news site and got a Popunder fired at them while they were doing something else entirely.
For a registration offer, where you’re asking a user to fill in a form, verify their phone number, and potentially go through a few more steps, that difference in arrival state really matters.
A person who’s already in “I’m exploring content” mode is just more likely to engage with your flow than one who’s in “I’m trying to read about last night’s match, and this ad appeared.”
From what we see across registration-focused campaigns on the PropellerAds self-service platform (SSP), intent state at the moment of exposure consistently accounts for a meaningful share of the variance between traffic sources. Social Traffic narrows your delivery to users who were actively following content. On a multi-step registration offer with no pre-lander warming them up first, that’s doing a lot of work.
What the +41% Revenue Efficiency Gap Means for Your Budget
Let’s run the math, because it’s worth seeing concretely.
Social Traffic generated $96.06 from 20,076 impressions – a revenue per mille (RPM) of $4.78. The total campaign RPM was $3.39. That’s $1.39 more per thousand impressions, or +41%.
Practical translation: those same 20,076 impressions at campaign-average RPM would have returned roughly $68 instead of $96. The gap on that impression slice alone is about $28. Run those numbers across a full month with consistent Social Traffic allocation, and you’re looking at a meaningful line on your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) calculation.
Registration & Revenue Efficiency
Social Traffic vs. Campaign Average — per 1,000 impressions
1,000 Impressions
1,000 Impressions (RPM)
To be clear: this isn’t a signal to immediately shift all your Onclick budget into Social Traffic. It’s a signal to run a proper test on your own offer and see if the efficiency gap shows up on your numbers too.
When Does Social Traffic Make the Most Sense for iGaming Registration?
This setup works best when registration is your primary KPI, and you’re routing straight to the signup page. The more steps between ad click and conversion, the more the intent advantage compounds – a motivated user is more likely to complete a 3-step form than someone who wasn’t looking for your offer.
For Nigeria specifically, the mobile-first context makes this an especially good fit. Your Social Traffic users are already on their phones in an active browsing posture. That’s exactly what a mobile registration funnel needs.
Practically speaking: if your test shows Social Traffic outperforming your Onclick RON baseline by 20%+ on registrations per 1000 impressions, that’s your cue to isolate it into its own campaign and put more budget behind it. Running Social Traffic separately gives you cleaner data for everything that comes after – zone-level exclusions, bid adjustments, and time-of-day analysis. When it’s mixed into a broader RON campaign, those optimization signals get diluted.
What This Data Doesn’t Tell You
One week, one campaign, 20,076 Social Traffic impressions. That’s a meaningful directional signal – not a mandate to restructure your whole Onclick setup.
A few things this analysis can’t answer: whether the efficiency gap holds when you scale Social Traffic volume significantly (efficiency can compress as you exhaust the best-performing zones), whether this specific operator’s brand recognition in Nigeria played a role, and whether a different week or creative would move the numbers.
Honest version: this data is strong enough to justify a dedicated test. PropellerAds’ standard test budget rule applies – roughly 20× your target CPA, run for at least 36 to 48 hours. For a registration campaign in Nigeria, that’s typically $50 to $100 to get a readable result. What it doesn’t justify is pulling budget from other traffic types before your own test confirms the pattern.
One Week of Data. One Test Worth Running.
This campaign gave us a clear result: Social Traffic delivered more registrations per 1000 impressions and more revenue per 1000 impressions than the overall campaign mix, across all seven days. One in six impressions, one in four registrations.
Petros Sofroniou, Account Strategist at PropellerAds:
Nigeria is one of the most competitive acquisition environments we work with – 174 brands chasing the same registered user means your cost-per-acquisition is under constant pressure. What we consistently see with Social Traffic is that it narrows your exposure to users who are already in an active, decision-making state.
For a direct registration funnel with no pre-lander, that arrival context does a lot of the qualification work before your offer even loads.
The +34% registration efficiency in this campaign isn’t unusual – it’s closer to the norm for iGaming registration in Tier-2 mobile-first markets. If you’re not already running Social Traffic as a dedicated campaign segment, that’s the first thing I’d change.
The reason isn’t mysterious. Users from social network sessions arrive in a different state than users who encounter a Popunder mid-session on a content site. For a registration offer that asks for three to five steps of completion, that arrival state difference translates directly into conversion rate.
You now have a benchmark. The question is whether it holds on your own campaigns – and the only way to find out is to test it.
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