BetVista Group: 40% CPA Reduction Across Four Regulated Markets in 30 Days
How a multi-licensed iGaming operator restructured its Google and Meta acquisition stack to crash first-month CPA without losing a single approved account.
The Challenge
BetVista Group held Tier-1 licenses in four jurisdictions (UKGC, MGA-EU passporting into Ireland, SGA in Sweden, Veikkaus-adjacent in Finland) but was actively running paid only in the UK. Their previous agency had been bounced off Meta twice in twelve months and was treating Google Ads as a fragile asset, throttling spend to avoid review.
First-time-deposit CPA had drifted up roughly 60% over eighteen months. Player LTV cohorts were strong, but the acquisition top of funnel was bleeding margin. They needed two things at once: cut CPA in the UK, and stand up compliant Google + Meta operations in three new markets, without a single account suspension that would invalidate the license-tied affiliate paperwork.
Our Approach
Per-license Business Manager separation
We provisioned a dedicated Meta Business Manager and Google MCC sub-account per regulated market. Each pair was tied to the local entity, the local payment-processor agreement, and the license-specific responsible-gaming language. No single account ever served two jurisdictions, eliminating the cross-license policy fires that had caused the previous suspensions.
Compliance-first creative production
Every static, video and prelander went through a per-jurisdiction policy review before launch. UKGC requires specific Gambling Commission registration display; SGA requires Spelpaus opt-out language; MGA requires precise license-number formatting. Our creative team rebuilt the asset library with regulator-locked templates so designers could ship variants without re-touching compliance copy.
Search restructure: brand defense + non-brand retake
The previous structure leaked 14% of brand traffic to affiliate competitors bidding on BetVista terms. We rebuilt brand campaigns with exact-match defense, locked the trademark, and freed budget to rebuild non-brand commercial-intent sets that had been paused for months.
Meta funnel rebuilt around FTD value, not registrations
Old account was optimizing on the registration event, which Meta was happy to scale, but which produced low-deposit-intent traffic. We migrated to FTD as the optimization event via Conversions API, accepting a slower learning phase in exchange for materially better account quality and dramatically lower FTD CPA.
Execution Timeline
Results
- ✓FTD CPA in the UK fell 40% within 30 days of full migration and held at 35-42% below baseline through month six.
- ✓FTD volume scaled 2.6× over the same period as the new markets came online, the new accounts contributed roughly half the incremental volume by month three.
- ✓Zero account suspensions across all four markets in the first eleven months. The previous agency had averaged one suspension event per quarter.
- ✓Brand-defense campaigns recaptured an estimated 14% of branded clicks previously leaking to affiliates, at a fraction of the CPA of non-brand traffic.
Results
Unled Network managed our Google and Meta campaigns across four markets. Our CPA dropped 40% in the first month. They understand iGaming compliance better than any agency we've worked with.
What This Engagement Taught Us
- ›License separation is non-negotiable. One BM per jurisdiction is more work to provision but eliminates the policy cascade that kills cross-market operators.
- ›Optimizing Meta on registrations gives you cheap registrations and expensive players. Optimizing on FTDs gives you the opposite.
- ›Brand defense is the highest-ROI search work most iGaming operators are not doing seriously enough.
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