One Game, One Frozen Budget: How Spank Reached 7× in Six Months

Written by the Growth Department at Jackpot Media from a live operator account. The figures below are reported by the team; the definition of the money metric is still pending confirmation, so this article calls it the monthly figure throughout.

• 7× — reported monthly figure
• +600% — on the starting figure
• 6 — months, frozen budget
• 8 → 2 — funnels tested, then funded

Most growth stories start with a bigger budget. This one starts with a budget that could not move. For six months the client's advertising spend was frozen, and the reported monthly figure still went from 50,000 to 350,000 TND — seven times, or +600%, on the same money.

What follows is the working method behind it: one game as the whole offer, one month of paid testing with an exit rule agreed in advance, and acquisition and retention run as a single loop on the Betdevel platform.

The constraint that shaped everything

When spend is fixed, the usual levers disappear. You cannot buy your way out of a weak funnel and you cannot test your way through everything at once. Two questions are left, and they decide the outcome:

• Which funnels get the money?
• What happens to a player after the first deposit?

Every decision on this campaign came back to one of those two.

Why one game beats a catalogue

The offer was a single slot game, Spank. Not a lobby, not a bonus package — one product at the centre of every creative, every preland and every message.

• The creative gets a concrete subject instead of a category.
• The landing has one thing to explain.
• The player has one reason to arrive.
• Every learning transfers, because all funnels point at the same product.

The game also carried its own return mechanic: 32 unlockable styles. Cosmetics are a reason to reopen the app that costs the operator no bonus money — so the same hook served acquisition creative and retention messaging at once.

Month one buys information, not results

Eight approaches ran side by side on equal money for the first thirty days. At the end of the month the two that reached the agreed cost per depositor took the whole remaining budget; the other six were switched off.

The exit rule matters more than the test. Agreed before the spend starts, it turns a hard call into arithmetic.

Three questions before a funnel keeps the budget

1. Data quality. Is it producing enough clean signal to judge at all?
2. Target action. Does it reach the action we agreed to pay for, not a proxy for it?
3. Cost of result. What does that action cost here, against the alternatives on test?

Illustrative — the shape of the decision, not a count of real campaigns.

Acquisition and retention are one loop

Traffic management decides who arrives. Retention decides whether the first deposit becomes a habit. Optimising one without the other is where budgets leak.

In practice the player journey was managed as five stages, with the platform owning the second half:

• Traffic management, stages 01–03: which funnels get money, and what the creative promises.
• Retention on Betdevel, stages 03–05: what reaches the player between the first deposit and the next one.

Acquisition → Registration → Deposit → Return visit → Repeat deposit

What the numbers did

Five months transcribed from the operator's dashboard tell a short story. Registrations of 1,325 in January fell to 627 in May, while repeat deposits went from 3,209 to 5,066 — up 58%. These are counts of actions, not money and not unique players.

The full series, month by month

Every figure, the source dashboard screenshot and the methodology behind them sit on the case page.

Read the full case →

The counter-intuitive part

Registrations fell across the period. Repeat deposits rose 58%. That is not a contradiction — it is the point. The funnel stopped buying volume and started buying players who deposit twice.

Operator insight: if your registration count is your headline metric, a sharper funnel will look like a decline for two months before it looks like growth. Agree on the metric before the test, not after it.

What we would test on your market

• A testing month with an exit rule. Several approaches, and a written rule for what stops at the end of it.
• One offer, not a catalogue. A single product to carry the creative, the landing and the promise.
• Retention planned with the campaign. What happens after the first deposit is designed alongside the ads, not after them.

Methodology & sources

• Team-reported: 50,000 → 350,000 TND per month, six months, 0% budget change. Supplied from an account we did not audit. 7× equals +600%.
• Transcribed: the January–May series, read off the operator dashboard screenshot.
• Calculated: month-on-month deltas and the +58% redeposit change — arithmetic on transcribed values only.
• Not derived: no ROI, ROAS, LTV, CPA or conversion rates. Counts of actions are not unique players.

The money metric behind the headline figure, the year on the dashboard and its association with the six-month period are all pending confirmation from the operator.

Key takeaways

• A frozen budget removes every lever except precision: which funnels get the money, and what happens after the first deposit.
• One game as the whole offer gives the creative a subject and the landing one thing to explain, so every learning transfers between funnels.
• A testing month is only useful with an exit rule agreed before the spend starts — it turns a hard call into arithmetic.
• Acquisition and retention optimised separately is where budgets leak; the platform owns the second half of the journey.
• Fewer registrations alongside more repeat deposits is a sharper funnel, not a decline. Agree the metric before the test, not after it.

Running this on your own platform

Funnel selection, payment configuration, segmented messaging and the reporting that ties a deposit back to its source are platform-level capabilities, not campaign decisions. If you are reviewing how your platform handles them, talk to our team →

Disclosure: This blog may include references to services we offer. Our team develops Professional iGaming Platforms, and provides consulting for gaming operators on analytics, compliance, and platform setup.

Author: Alex S
Growth Department at Jackpot Media. iGaming content and traffic.