Context
Liga Stavok is a leading sports betting brand with a high-intent mobile audience. The team was looking to aggressively grow adoption of their app, having already seen strong early traction through organic and ASO efforts.
When Liga Stavok set out to accelerate growth for its mobile betting app, the brief was simple: hit target CPA fast and scale without sacrificing efficiency. In late January 2025, the Liga Stavok team chose Kayzen’s fully managed DSP to run programmatic user acquisition. Performance locked in quickly, giving them a stable foundation to keep scaling.
Challenge
The team wanted a partner who could move fast on programmatic, handle day-to-day trading, and optimize to deposit outcomes, not just installs. With ambitious growth goals and the need to prove performance early, they’ve set non-negotiables going in:
- Acquire net-new depositing users at their target CPA
- Ramp spend quickly once efficiency is proven
- Keep optimization centered on post-install value signals
- Operate with a fully managed trading model
Approach
Kayzen’s model combines automated bidding and optimization with hands-on campaign expertise from a dedicated trading team. From day one, the team took full ownership of setup, pacing, and optimization. The focus early on was to converge on Liga Stavok’s target CPA fast, without overspending in the learning phase or chasing cheap traffic that wouldn’t convert.
Rapid experimentation to hit target CPA
In the first 2–3 weeks, we ran tightly controlled experiments across bids, exchanges, and creatives to identify high-quality supply paths and creative directions. This allowed us to stabilize CPMs and isolate what worked before pushing scale.
What this looked like in practice:
- Precision ramp – A structured learning plan focused on testing bid shading strategies, exchange and app allowlists, and frequency envelopes. The goal was to quickly zero in on cost-effective inventory.
- Creative iteration – Multiple ad concepts and formats were tested early to align with key sports moments and Liga Stavok’s core value props. Kayzen’s Creative Optimization algorithm optimizes for conversions by gradually prioritizing creatives that deliver stronger performance within a given campaign.
- Signal-led optimization – Campaigns optimized to deposit events via MMP postbacks, enabling smarter bidding and more consistent CPA at higher spend levels.
- Always-on safeguards – Fraud controls, tight pacing, and daily budget governance, kept growth sustainable.
Why Kayzen’s CPA algorithm made the difference
A big part of what made this scale possible was Kayzen’s CPA bidding model, which is designed to optimize for events while keeping cost at Liga Stavok’s targets.
- Optimized to real business outcomes – Kayzen’s bidding learns directly from deposit events, not just installs. This allows the system to prioritize inventory and user profiles most likely to convert to first-time depositors at or below target CPA.
- Fast convergence, stable scaling – During ramp, the algorithm explores bids and supply paths broadly. Once it finds efficient pockets, it automatically shifts spend toward them. This shortens time-to-target and keeps CPA volatility low as budgets increase.
- Privacy-ready signal handling – With MMP SDK postbacks, the model aggregates signals to maintain optimization accuracy without relying on granular user identifiers—crucial for consistency across OS versions and privacy changes.
- Smart pacing and guardrails – Integrated frequency controls, supply quality scoring, and budget pacing work in tandem with CPA bidding so scale doesn’t come at the cost of efficiency.
- Continuous creative feedback – Performance signals tie back to creative variants, enabling the algorithm and trading team to rotate in winning messages and formats while quickly down-weighting fatigued assets.
Impact
Results didn’t take long to show. CPA locked in early and stayed consistent as spend increased, giving Liga Stavok the stability it needed to focus on growth.
- Hit target CPA within 2–3 weeks of launch
- Scaled monthly UA volume by 6x within the first six months while holding CPA at target
- Maintained target CPA for six consecutive months (and counting)
- Freed Liga Stavok’s team to focus on lifecycle and product, with Kayzen managing daily trading
Why it worked
Fast test-and-learn was key in the early phase, with high-cadence experiments helping lock in the right supply paths and bidding strategies. The team also optimized toward quality signals, specifically deposit events rather than installs, which kept the algorithm focused on users who actually delivered value. And as budgets increased, controlled scale was made possible through frequency caps, placement guardrails, and pacing checks that helped limit CPA drift while maintaining efficiency.
