BetVista Group: Slashed CPA by 40% Across Four Regulated Markets Within 30 Days
A multi-licensed iGaming operator overhauled its Google and Meta buying approach, cutting first-month CPA sharply without risking a single approved account.
The Problem
BetVista Group held Tier-1 licenses across four jurisdictions (UKGC, MGA-EU with Ireland passporting, SGA in Sweden, Veikkaus-aligned in Finland), yet their paid campaigns ran only in the UK. A prior agency had been banned from Meta twice in the previous year and was treating Google Ads with such caution that they kept budgets deliberately low to sidestep scrutiny.
Cost per acquisition for initial deposits had climbed by about 60% across eighteen months. Player lifetime value cohorts looked sound, but up-funnel acquisition margins were being squeezed dry. They faced a double bind: bring down CPA across the UK market, whilst simultaneously launching fully compliant Google and Meta operations in three fresh territories, all without a single account ban that would torpedo the affiliate arrangements tied to their licenses.
How We Worked It
Dedicated Business Manager per licence
We set up a separate Meta Business Manager and Google MCC sub-account for each regulated jurisdiction. Every pairing was anchored to the local business entity, the relevant payment processor agreements, and the licence-specific responsible gaming terms. No single account crossed boundaries between markets, which meant we sidestepped the multi-jurisdiction policy tangles that had triggered earlier suspensions.
Compliance built into creative from day one
Every image, video and pre-landing page faced a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction policy check before going live. UKGC demands specific Gambling Commission registration visibility; SGA insists on Spelpaus opt-out wording; MGA specifies exact licence-number layouts. We rebuilt the creative stockpile with regulator-approved templates, letting designers ship market-specific versions without rewording any compliance text.
Search campaigns rebuilt: brand protection and non-brand expansion
The old setup let 14% of brand searches slip through to affiliate rivals bidding on BetVista. We rebuilt brand campaigns with exact-match safeguards, locked down the trademark bidding, and redirected budget into non-brand commercial searches that had been switched off for months.
Meta funnel refocused: first-deposit value, not signup numbers
The previous setup targeted the signup event, which Meta was happy to scale, but it pulled in visitors with weak deposit intent. We switched to first-deposit value as the optimisation target using Conversions API, accepting a slower ramp-up in return for far better account health and substantially cheaper first-deposit CPA.
The Timeline
What We Delivered
- ✓First-deposit CPA in the UK dropped 40% within thirty days of the full changeover and stayed 35 to 42% better than the starting point through month six.
- ✓First-deposit volume grew 2.6 times in that same window as the new markets opened up, with the fresh accounts accounting for roughly half of the added volume by the third month.
- ✓Not a single account suspension across all four markets in the opening eleven months. The previous agency had seen roughly one suspension event every three months.
- ✓Brand-protection campaigns recovered roughly 14% of branded searches that were leaking to affiliate competitors, at a much lower CPA than non-brand campaigns.
"Unled Network ran our Google and Meta activity across all four territories. Our CPA fell 40% in the first month. No agency we have partnered with knows iGaming compliance quite as thoroughly.
Richard HolmbergChief Marketing Officer, BetVista Group
What We Learned from This Work
- ›Licence separation is mandatory. One Business Manager per jurisdiction requires more effort to set up but stops the cascade of policy failures that can wreck multi-market operations.
- ›If Meta optimises for signups, you get cheap signups but pricey players. If it optimises for first deposits, the equation flips on its head.
- ›Most iGaming operators skip brand defence entirely, yet it delivers the highest ROAS of any search tactic they could implement.
Further Client Examples
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