iGaming Affiliate Platform
Repositioning a comparison and review platform through brand storytelling and a corrected funnel, inside a heavily regulated category.
- Industry
- iGaming affiliate / review
- Markets
- Italy (paid) + UK (organic)
- Paid budget
- €1,000/month — Italy
Context
Starting point
The client is an affiliate review and comparison platform for online gaming, operating across two markets with different mechanics: Italy, running on paid Meta Ads at €1,000/month, and the UK, organic only. What the platform actually sells is not games or bonuses — it's decision simplification, trust and a curated shortcut to a legitimate choice.
The category is heavily regulated, which directly limits the available creative and advertising toolkit — many direct promotional formats are unavailable or carry moderation risk.
Approach
What was built
Jobs-to-be-done and audience strategy
Built a core JTBD across functional, emotional and social layers, and split the audience into four segments — each with its own audience-construction signals, offer strategy, ad hooks, conversion triggers and value-proposition hierarchy.
Maximisers
Looking for the best deal — promo codes, comparisons, welcome offers
Risk reducers
Looking for safety and legitimacy — licensing, payment methods, payout speed
Explorers
Looking for variety and novelty — game count, providers, new categories
Casual seekers
Looking for low-friction entertainment — instant access, demo modes
Paid testing infrastructure
Built an audience × creative-format testing matrix for Meta Ads (video, static, carousel, video hooks), with a dedicated retargeting track for the Maximisers segment.
Hypotheses we tested
- In a trust-scarce, heavily regulated category, non-promotional attention content would out-convert offer-led creative. Confirmed (up to 4× difference in CPLPV between creatives).
- Broad audiences outperform narrow targeting. Confirmed (best creatives achieved €0.12–0.17 per landing-page view).
- Comparative informational content is not effective as a landing page format for improving session duration or conversion performance. Demo pages are used as a source to increase session duration on the website. Confirmed. Average engaged session duration increased by 35%
What we implemented, and where
Paid market — Italy (Meta Ads)
The audience × creative-format testing matrix; landing-view-optimised acquisition; profile-promotion campaigns for the owned community; pixel-based, URL-level custom audiences; a retargeting track; and a lookalike layer for cold expansion.
Organic market — UK (owned social)
Community and retention content, with no paid support.
Creative & content system — both markets
The four-segment JTBD applied to hooks, offers and value-proposition order; a funnel-mapped content plan; the mascot/storytelling concept; and the brain-teaser format — all built to clear the category's moderation limits.
Where the budget went
Against the €1,000/month Italian budget, spend was weighted deliberately:
Three-tier KPI dashboard
Built a bottom-up quarterly forecast with three KPI tiers — outcome (traffic and follower base, split organic vs paid, each with target / pacing / status), driver (net-adds, link clicks, cost-per-follower by platform), and diagnostics (budget pacing, channel mix, data quality).
Mascot and storytelling concept
Designed a recurring mascot and storytelling approach for ad creative, built specifically to work within the category's moderation and compliance limits — keeping engagement and recall high without relying on direct, trigger-prone messaging.
Brand repositioning
Shifted the brand narrative from a neutral comparison list to a "user protector" stance — pushing the existing risk-reducer segment up from an audience-targeting idea to a full brand position, changing how the platform is perceived industry-wide.
Results
What it produced
3%
ad CTR — achieved on campaigns using the mascot / storytelling concept
+40%
Landing page views
+35%
Engaged sessions
+15%
Audience retention on owned social channels
That CTR translated directly into revenue growth through the platform's payout-based monetisation model — a better-qualified click leads to a better-qualified conversion on the partner platform's side.