Anyone got workflows that fix low CVR in igaming ppc?

[john1106]

I’ve been tweaking campaigns for a while now, but the one thing I kept circling back to was this annoying dip in CVR for some of my igaming ppc setups. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t stable either. And whenever that starts happening, I always wonder if it’s the traffic, the creatives, or the bidding being out of sync. So I figured I’d share how I approached it, in case someone else here is dealing with the same weird drop-offs.

The thing that pushed me to actually rethink my workflow was watching one of my better-performing campaigns slow down for no obvious reason. The targeting was fine, the audience hadn’t changed, and I didn’t touch the bids that week. But the conversions dropped anyway. I kept asking myself whether I was just overreacting or missing something obvious. That’s usually the point where I dig around in the details.

At first, I assumed it was just ad fatigue. That’s the easy thing to point to. I swapped in a couple of backup creatives I had sitting around, thinking that would bump things back up. But all it did was flatten the numbers. CVR wasn’t sinking but it wasn’t coming back either. That’s when I realized this wasn’t going to be one of those simple “change the banner and move on” situations.

So I started breaking things down. Not in the fancy dashboard-automation way, just the normal “what’s actually happening here” sort of process. I opened up my search terms, placements, and the hour-by-hour breakdown. One thing that stood out to me was that some of the lookalike and broad-ish segments were still sending volume, but not the type of users who actually stick. I’d been letting those run without checking them for a couple of weeks because they usually perform okay. Turns out "usually" isn’t good enough when CVR is dipping.

Then I moved on to the landing page side. I’m not a designer, but I always look at whether the page matches the promise in the ad. In our niche especially, even small mismatches kill conversions. One headline felt slightly off compared to the creative that was driving most of the clicks. It wasn’t wrong, just not aligned enough. I updated it to make it more consistent in tone and clarity. Tiny change, quiet impact. The numbers didn’t spike immediately, but the bounce rate started improving over the next couple of days.

After that, I played around with the bidding. I lowered bids on segments that were dragging but didn’t cut them entirely. Cutting too fast always messes with my data. I prefer nudging things down and watching how the system reacts. Slow adjustments seem to give me a better read on whether the audience is still worth keeping.

One thing I’ll say is that I didn’t overhaul everything at once. That always leads to chaos because you can’t tell what worked. Instead, I kind of fell into this rhythm: tweak the audience, watch the trend, tweak the landing page, watch the trend, tweak the bidding, repeat. It’s not glamorous, but it let me get a pretty clear picture of what the campaign wanted to do.

During this whole process, I came across a breakdown that reminded me how helpful a structured workflow can be. It wasn’t anything salesy, just a clear walkthrough of what to test and in what order. For anyone who wants a more step-by-step style approach, here’s the link I found helpful: fix low CVR with proven PPC tactics. I didn’t follow it word for word, but it nudged me to look at a couple of angles I had ignored.

After a couple of weeks of this back-and-forth testing, the CVR finally started climbing back. Not a huge jump, but enough to get the campaign back into a comfortable zone. What surprised me most was that the fixes weren’t dramatic. It wasn’t some secret trick or tool I was missing. It was mostly tightening things I normally tighten, but doing it more consistently and with more patience.

The biggest lesson for me was not assuming the problem is where it’s most obvious. Ad fatigue looked like the culprit, but the real issue was a mix of audience drift and small inconsistencies in the user path. Once I lined everything up again, things settled.

So if anyone else is fighting low CVR in igaming ppc right now, my take is: don’t rush to overhaul everything. Start with the boring checks. Look at the audience quality, check if the promise in the ad matches the page, and give your bids a reality check. Then just keep iterating without panicking. Most of the time, the fix is in the details, not in some dramatic change.