Context
In the hyper-competitive iGaming world, reaching users is easy, but reaching the right long-term users at scale is the ultimate challenge.
BetRivers, a top-tier online sports betting and casino platform operating in highly competitive markets, faced this exact dilemma: how to scale mobile user acquisition in Ontario, Canada, without burning through the same audience or compromising long-term value.
To support these growth ambitions, BetRivers partnered with Z2A Digital, a full-funnel advertising agency specializing in scalable acquisition strategies for apps and digital brands. Together, they leveraged Kayzen’s advanced programmatic infrastructure and platform features for strategic campaign setup and smarter optimization. The result: BetRivers consistently grew their funnel, doubled registrations, and proved that scale and performance don’t have to be a tradeoff.
Read on to see exactly how they reached 141M unique users with efficient audience coverage and achieved significant growth in First Time Deposits (FTDs) and deposits within three months.
Challenge
For BetRivers, success went beyond delivering impressions; it was about consistently reaching new users who could move through the funnel and become loyal, long-term users.
The opportunity was clear: programmatic unlocks access to a massive, highly engaged mobile audience across both app and mobile web. But scale alone wasn’t enough in the Ontario, Canada market. The real challenge was to reach high-intent users efficiently, sustain funnel growth over time, and avoid overexposing the same audiences.
To set the campaign up for success from day one, Z2A eliminated guesswork on what creatives to run and what CPM to bid by utilizing kAI Explorer. kAI Explorer is Kayzen’s planning intelligence tool that explores available inventory to help accurately do media planning. Leveraging the tool’s intelligence, Z2A strategically decided to lead with smaller banner sizes due to their strong inventory availability and broad reach. This approach allowed them to secure wide unique user reach at competitive CPMs.
The objectives were clear:
- Reach new, high-intent, unique users at scale across app and mobile web environments in a competitive market like Ontario, Canada.
- Drive cost-efficient downloads and registrations on a consistent and sustainable way.
Approach
Z2A structured the campaign across two parallel tracks, app and mobile web, to independently monitor performance signals and optimize each environment. This proactive separation provided cleaner signals by allowing the team to track reach, frequency, and performance across both channels. With a clear funnel logic, the campaign initially prioritized volume to build broader reach while monitoring registrations as the primary performance indicator. As the strategy matured, these registrations provided a consistent pulse on audience quality, giving the team confidence to scale the highest-performing segments.
Kayzen’s granular targeting capabilities were instrumental in ensuring precision from the outset: supporting targeting across a wide range of dimensions (device type, OS, and network type). The campaign focused specifically on iOS users, with targeting narrowed to the city level to ensure every impression reached the intended audience in Ontario. To ensure the budget was consistently allocated to new users and to drive engagement across the funnel, Z2A implemented strict impression capping. This not only controlled the number of ads a user could see within a given time frame, but also enforced minimum spacing between exposures to avoid excessive frequency clustering.
To maximize efficiency, Z2A strategically leveraged kAI Core, Kayzen’s cutting-edge machine learning and algorithmic backbone, powered by deep neural networks to deliver unparalleled scale and quality. Operating behind the scenes, kAI Core ensures campaign execution is aligned with performance goals through its core capabilities:
- Intelligent Bidding and Pricing: Predicts event probability and sets optimal bids in real time, applying bid shading to minimize CPMs without compromising performance.
- Pacing and Targets: Uses algorithmic feedback loops to manage budget pacing and adapt delivery to performance goals, ensuring stability at scale.
- Traffic Quality at Scale: Filters and prioritizes bid requests, removing low-value inventory and invalid traffic to focus spend on higher-quality opportunities.
- Continuous Learning: Continuously learns from campaign and inventory signals, improving bid precision and reliability without manual tuning.
This comprehensive strategy, powered by the continuous optimization of kAI Core, provided Z2A with a data-driven blueprint to achieve massive scale without compromising efficiency in a competitive market.
Impact
Reaching scale, not saturation
Across both the app and mobile web campaigns, Kayzen delivered 404M impressions and reached 141M unique users, a ratio that reflects a deliberate balance between scale and efficiency. The third month was the peak month, with 164M impressions and spend scaling proportionally. New unique users flowed in consistently throughout the campaigns, confirming the platform was expanding reach rather than recycling exposure to the same audience.
The massive reach achieved throughout the campaign was powered by Kayzen’s expansive programmatic infrastructure. By processing over 4.2 billion bid requests across app and mobile web environments in Q1 alone, Z2A unlocked the necessary breadth to consistently engage new, unique users without overexposing or exhausting the available audience.
Efficiency at scale
The campaign trajectory tells two complementary stories:
An initial scale-up phase brought rapid audience expansion, with new unique users growing consistently alongside impressions. As the campaigns matured, volume held strong while costs stabilized, proving the platform could sustain scale efficiently, not just achieve it.
The app and mobile web campaigns each played a distinct role in this story:
The app campaign drove significantly higher click volume (153K clicks vs 65K), positioning it as the performance engine of the strategy.
The mobile web campaign, on the other hand, reached nearly double the unique users at a much lower cost per click, functioning as the reach engine.
Rather than running two identical campaigns, Z2A effectively split the strategy across environments: one optimized for engagement, one for audience expansion.
Together, they delivered both.
Funnel Impact: from exposure to action
The ultimate validation of this dual-track strategy lies in its downstream impact. Beyond surface-level metrics, the campaign successfully reached high-intent users who moved purposefully through the funnel. This is evidenced by a significant surge in user action: registrations more than doubled between the first and third months (climbing from approximately 2,800 to over 6,000) while First-Time Deposits grew by over 60% (over 2,500 across the campaign period) following the same upward trajectory.
This sustained performance proves that the users reached weren’t just passive observers, but high-quality audiences engaging meaningfully far beyond the first touchpoint.
Final Insights
Z2A’s success running BetRivers campaigns confirms a crucial insight: achieving massive scale and driving deep-funnel performance don’t have to be a tradeoff.
The strategic foundation was laid by Z2A Digital, leveraging Kayzen’s infrastructure, machine learning, and dual app/wmobile campaigns to ensure sustained unique reach and provide clean, segment-specific data for optimization.
Ultimately, the goal of reaching high-quality users was achieved, demonstrated by registrations and First-Time Deposits (FTDs) more than doubling from the campaign period. This trajectory from initial exposure to meaningful action proves that with the right technology and a clear strategy, real funnel impact follows.
The foundations built here: audience signals, inventory intelligence, and environment-level performance data are actively informing how future betting and gaming campaigns are approached.
Armed with a deeper understanding of environment-specific performance within Ontario’s iGaming landscape, Z2A Digital is now positioned to execute future campaigns with greater confidence and precision. Powered by machine learning and AI across the full funnel, from planning to optimization, Kayzen leverages its modular platform with granular targeting and scalable execution, enabling teams to act on real-time signals, eliminate guesswork, and build every initiative on a strong data-driven foundation.
