Cost per acquisition
What this page covers
Cost per acquisition
Cost per acquisition (CPA) shows how efficiently your marketing budget turns impressions, clicks, or views into paying users or completed actions. For gaming and iGaming brands, it is a core KPI for evaluating user acquisition performance across channels and formats.
On social and video platforms, CPA is tightly linked to cost per view (CPV), where brands pay for each view of creator content. By comparing CPV and the share of views that convert into players, you can see which platforms and creators bring new users at a sustainable acquisition cost.
In brief
- Cost per acquisition measures how much you spend to get one new customer or target action, often starting from paid views of creator content on TikTok, YouTube, Telegram, VK and other platforms.
- If you do not filter out invalid traffic and bots, your CPA rises artificially, budgets are misallocated, and your data on conversions, retention, and LTV for games becomes unreliable.
- Accurate tracking pixels, post-view and post-click verification, and clear attribution rules help you see real user behavior after an impression or click and calculate the true cost of each acquisition.
What to do
On platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and VK, gaming and iGaming brands often start with CPV, paying for each view of creator or ad content. Average CPV levels differ by network, region, and creator tier, so the same budget can generate very different volumes of views and potential acquisitions depending on where you run campaigns.
To turn these views into efficient acquisitions, teams build structured user acquisition programs. This includes a clear strategy, monetization logic for the game, detailed briefs for creators, and ongoing launch, testing, and scaling of campaigns in major channels such as Facebook, TikTok, and programmatic networks, with a focus on stable, KPI-based growth.
Within this process, expert management of ad accounts, creative testing, and traffic mix optimization helps keep CPA under control. When campaigns are managed end-to-end, from planning to optimization, it becomes easier to compare channels by real efficiency and shift budgets toward those that bring more paying users for the same or lower acquisition cost.
What to keep in mind
Cost per acquisition is never a single fixed number across all channels or titles. Research into CPV shows that the lowest cost of contact can be in VK Video and TikTok, while Telegram can be higher. This means that even before conversions, the starting price of each potential acquisition differs by platform and creator segment.
At the same time, not every recorded click or view represents a real player. Invalid traffic and bots can generate impressions, clicks, or form fills without any in-game activity or revenue. When analytics systems treat this traffic as real users, conversion rates, ROAS, and LTV models are distorted, hiding the true cost of acquisition for your game.
Because of this, brands increasingly rely on verification and tracking tools. Post-view pixels and post-click tracking from specialized providers allow advertisers to see what happens after an impression or click, segment audiences by GEO, device, behavior, and interests, and understand which placements and creators actually bring valuable users at an acceptable CPA.