In iGaming, fast growth and sustainable growth are not always the same thing. Strategies focused on cheap traffic and volume can deliver short-term results, but they can also impact churn, player value, and profitability.
With 19 years of experience in iGaming and digital marketing, Christoffer Gronlund, CEO & Founder of Mindboogie Marketing AB, has worked on both the operator and agency sides. In this interview, he explores why acquisition should focus on value rather than volume, the role of first-party and CRM data, and how to build growth strategies designed to last.
Growth and responsible gaming are sometimes framed as competing priorities. Do you think that is a false trade-off? What does sustainable growth actually look like for an iGaming business today?
It’s a bit of a false trade-off, and it is usually a sign that a business is about to take on what I would call borrowed growth, or fake growth. Cheap acquisition today will make brands suffer in the end through churn, weak LTV, or both. Sustainable growth isn’t the slower, safer version of aggressive growth; it’s just growth that’s actually real, growth you never have to borrow against the future for.
My take is that Brands need to build the house from the ground up and let their first-party and CRM data lead the way. If we look at the funnel and the channel side, gambling sits within Google’s sensitive-category bucket, so several audience-expansion tools other verticals have available simply aren’t on the table for real-money gambling products in the first place. What looks like a limitation has actually pushed the industry toward healthier measurement, bidding, and budget decisions driven by value signals fed back from CRM, not a player list being uploaded to an ad platform. Cheap traffic is cheap for a reason, and sustainable growth just means you never have to take that shortcut; you act on your own data instead, balancing push and pull marketing rather than chasing whichever channel looks fastest.
Acquisition teams are often rewarded for bringing in more players, but not every acquired user has the same long-term value. Should the industry be moving away from volume-driven acquisition toward metrics that better reflect player quality, retention and sustainability?
In a sense, yes, and the industry has had the data to do this for a while. If an acquisition team is measured on FTDs, they will optimize for FTDs, that’s exactly the KPI they´ve been asked to deliver. The fix is blending CPA with a forward-looking value metric to optimize for a blended LTV-to-CPA ratio rather than isolated Cost Per Acquisition, so a cheaper player who churns in a week stops looking like a win on a dashboard.
And that’s not just a reporting number; it’s something you can actually optimize the buying against. Value-based bidding in Google Ads, Value Optimization in Meta, and value-driven bidding models across Programmatic all let you feed that same signal back into the platforms, so the algorithms start chasing quality instead of cheap volume. Once acquisition is rewarded for the same outcome CRM is rewarded for, the two teams stop pulling in different directions, and quality becomes the default rather than something you have to remind people to care about.
As privacy regulation and platform restrictions reshape digital advertising, how do you expect iGaming acquisition strategies to evolve? Will affiliates become more important, or will the channel itself need to change?
As regulation and platform restrictions keep tightening, I would argue that the channels that win are the ones you can actually prove are working. Consent is already in place; every serious channel demands proper GDPR consent today.
What will decide now is how well brands actually read and analyze their own data-driven attribution. That’s what lets you identify the winning horses, the behavioral patterns and the specific channels actually converting the right players, not just any conversion, and shift budget toward them instead of guessing. That´s the winning Acquisition strategy moving forward.
So, I wouldn’t say all affiliates will remain important. The channels that matter most are simply the ones the data proves bring home the right conversions. But I am saying that selected Top Tier 1 Affiliate Partners will always remain relevant, as they have always been a part of the backbone in any iGaming brand’s marketing funnel.
Looking ahead, what do you think will separate the iGaming companies that achieve sustainable growth from those that continue optimizing primarily for short-term acquisition and revenue?
Brands that are willing to grow at a slightly slower pace than they could early on, are often making the wiser move. Every operator can hit an aggressive growth number if they’re willing to take on enough borrowed growth, or fake growth, as I mentioned earlier, questionable traffic, bonus structures that reward the wrong behavior, along the way. The businesses that separate themselves are the ones treating that “borrowed growth” the same way a CFO treats financial debt, as something with real interest, in churn, that becomes very clear once it’s actually analysed and reviewed.
Sustainable growth is just the more profitable, long-term version of growth that doesn’t owe anyone anything. I always tell my clients we need to build the house from the ground up and move up the funnel step by step, using first-party and CRM data as fuel. Yes, that means growing a bit slower initially, but once that growth engine is actually in place, technically, with a synchronized, omnichannel approach and state-of-the-art setups driving it, iGaming companies can then scale up in a way that’s genuinely sustainable, built to last rather than built to impress this quarter.
Google Ads is one of the toughest channels for gambling brands; personalized audiences, lookalikes, and identity-based retargeting- the tools most advertisers rely on- are largely off the table. How have you turned that restriction into an advantage, and how is that extra ROAS performance actually created?
In Google Ads, we are allowed to share value but not identity. Top features like Customer Match, remarketing lists, and lookalike audiences are all off the table for real-money gambling, so we don’t chase that workaround. Instead, we tell the platform how valuable a click turned out to be, without ever telling it who clicked. No player list, no identities, nothing personal ever leaves our systems, just LTV feeding the algorithm.
We can only optimize on what actually happened, not on assumptions about who looks promising. With gambling locked out of the easy tools, we had to find our own way and build something that works for our industry. We can run the same logic across programmatic too, but with hashed, consented CRM data for sharper retargeting and exclusion, so that Google Ads and programmatic reinforce each other instead of running as two disconnected budgets.
Subscribe to our newsletter
Important Security Notice
Beware of scammers impersonating Tappx brand
We have identified fraudulent activities where malicious actors are imitating Tappx assets. These scams may compromise your security.
⚠️ Warning: The URL you came from has been flagged as potentially harmful.
To stay safe, only trust communications and services from the official Tappx domain: tappx.com
