23K FTDs and +40% ROI: profitable Mexico campaign with PIN-UP Partners
Mexico is one of the most interesting yet challenging markets in LATAM. Those who’ve tried to drive traffic there know: on one hand, it offers cheap traffic and highly motivated players eager to deposit. On the other hand, rising competition and unique local behavior can easily break your usual funnels, while user retention requires a completely different approach.
At PIN-UP Partners, we’ve been helping teams and solo affiliates around the world earn consistently and scale their traffic for over 9 years. During this time, we’ve seen hundreds of successful cases, and it’s always a pleasure to share fresh partner results.
One of them is a recent campaign in Mexico from one of our partners — an NDA team that chose to remain anonymous but allowed us to share the numbers and a few useful insights. Below, we’ll break down how they managed to bring in 23,000 FTDs and achieve a +40% ROI, what strategies they used, and which decisions turned out to be crucial.
Initial data and setup
The team worked under a CPA model with an individual rate, driving traffic to our gambling offer — a PIN-UP iGaming product with strong brand recognition and high player trust across LATAM. The solid brand trust provided a clear advantage from the very beginning, as our product converts exceptionally well, reducing the need for pre-warming and helping campaigns reach profitability faster.
The
traffic source was a Facebook in combo with PWA (Progressive Web App), and for a good reason:
- Facebook remains the #1 social network in Mexico, with over 93 million users.
- PWA helps bypass Facebook’s ad restrictions, simplifies the app installation process, and reduces churn on low-end devices.
The campaign period ran from June 1 to August 31, 2025.
For each funnel, the team created separate pixels, ad accounts, and fan pages to stay independent from a single Business Manager and minimize the risk of account bans cascading across the system.
For analytics, they used our PIN-UP Partners dashboard with detailed statistics to track deposit dynamics and LTV. The data synchronized daily, allowing the team to quickly respond to trends and reallocate budgets between ad sets and campaign funnels in real time.
Campaign settings, budgets, testing, and scaling
When it came to launching campaigns, the team started with broad targeting — no interests, only mobile devices on Android 9+, excluding tablets. Their experience showed that while detailed targeting can slightly improve traffic quality, it also increases lead cost by 20–40%.
Placements were selected manually: Facebook and Instagram (feeds and stories). The logic was straightforward, just to focus on placements where users are most likely to complete registration.
In terms of budgeting, during the testing phase the team used the x3 rule (spending up to three times the payout per creative). The first month broke even, but this phase proved crucial: it revealed clear winning segments and approaches, while underperforming hypotheses could be confidently dropped.
Next came gradual optimization and scaling. The team identified “winning” combinations, fine-tuned the details, and increased budgets progressively (x2–x3) while monitoring ROI stability. They simultaneously narrowed targeting to audiences that delivered consistent conversions and positive returns. As the partners themselves noted:
“We’re not interested in funnels that bring profit but can’t scale. The goal isn’t just to hit ROI once; it’s to maintain it as budgets grow. When a funnel is stable, scaling happens smoothly without price spikes, and that’s what brings real results.”
This systematic approach allowed the team to keep ROI steady while scaling volumes and to build a clear picture of the entire campaign cycle.
PWAs and creatives: turning the setup into a working funnel
Campaigns and settings are one thing, but every media buyer knows this truth: if the creative doesn’t hit and the PWA funnel doesn’t retain — there’s NO profit.
The team understood that perfectly, so all their work revolved around testing ideas. Each PWA followed a simple, time-tested formula: clean design, short copy, and strong social proof. On screen, users saw real names, comments, and testimonials. In Mexico, players respond not to grand promises or polished ads, but to what feels authentic, like a friend’s recommendation. That’s why this formula worked, still works, and will keep working.
The team tested different hypotheses. Some PWAs emphasized welcome bonuses and fast registration, while others focused on popular classic slots like Oink Oink Oink, Mega Fire Blaze: 3 Wizards, and Buffalo Blitz from PlayTech, among others.
They didn’t stop at one winning funnel. Throughout the campaign, they constantly refreshed and refined their PWAs, testing micro changes (CTA color and copy variations, block order, review placement, and phrasing sequence).
Special attention was given to localization, a crucial element in any traffic campaign. All content was translated into Mexican Spanish, with local slang and cultural nuances. The interfaces featured logos of OXXO and SPEI (Mexico’s most popular payment systems). These details made the product feel like something created by a local amigo, not just another international offer with generic promises.
Now, let’s talk about creatives. The team started with a wide pool of concepts: videos and static formats in 1:1, 4:5, and 9:16 ratios. Since most of the Mexican audience is mobile-first, vertical videos performed best, though square formats still worked great in feeds.
The main focus wasn’t on flashy visuals but on authentic and relatable presentation. Most successful creatives looked simple: clear calls to action, familiar symbols, and genuine emotions. This style (light, believable, almost “homely”) works best for the mass audience in Mexico. Visual overload, complex ideas, or abstract concepts, on the other hand, only decrease engagement.
Creative ideas came from multiple sources:
spy tools, PIN-UP Partners’ internal analytics, successful cases in other GEOs, and local trends) from sports events and holidays to viral topics on
TikTok and YouTube). Additionally, we provided the team with our ready-made creatives and landings, examples of which you can see below.
And that’s just a small sample. PIN-UP Partners can prepare custom landing pages with full localization by native speakers for any GEO on request.
Key insights on player behavior
Once the funnels stabilized and the campaigns turned profitable, the team moved to the next level — analyzing player behavior. At PIN-UP Partners, we always emphasize that in GEOs like Mexico, understanding how players behave is what ultimately determines the profit.
The team dug deep into the data, looking for behavioral patterns that truly affected ROI, and here’s what they found.
First of all, conversion rates turned out to depend strongly on the time of day. The highest engagement came between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. local time. During those hours, users were more likely to move from ads to PWA, register faster, and reach their first deposit. This became the campaign’s prime time. After optimizing around these hours, ROI increased by about 8%, while FTD per thousand clicks grew by nearly 10%.
Secondly, demographics also played a key role. The bulk of traffic and the most stable retention came from men aged 25–35 — the core audience most likely to engage with the product and deposit without lengthy warming. They also showed the highest LTV compared to other age groups.
Meanwhile, female audiences responded more actively to creatives (CTR was 15% higher) but converted to FTDs much less frequently. Behavioral analysis revealed that women clicked more on emotionally driven visuals — for example, messages like “Luck is on your side today” or “Only for new players”. However, their motivation to play further down the funnel dropped significantly. Based on these findings, the team shifted focus toward the male segment while keeping female campaigns in smaller volumes — for retargeting and additional testing.
Importantly, the team tracked not only deposits but also player quality after FTD. According to our partners’ data, NetDep (net deposits) and ARPU (average revenue per user) remained consistently high even as campaigns scaled.
This close attention to user behavior allowed the team to maintain stable ROI and avoid the common trap where increasing budget leads to more volume but lower quality. In this case, behavioral analytics became the core of the entire strategy, guiding decisions on creatives/landing pages, scheduling, and audience segmentation.
The results of this case
The three-month campaign in Mexico proved not only profitable but also showed that with the right setup and systematic approach, the Mexican GEO can deliver solid results, especially when working with PIN-UP Partners.
Between June 1 and August 31, 2025, the team achieved:
- Total spend: $536,393.59
- FTDs: 23,774
- Team profit: $749 998 (of which $213 604 was net profit)
- ROI: +40%
Yes, the first month broke even, but that’s exactly what allowed the team to build a working system, fine-tune their funnels, and achieve stable, predictable growth without lead price spikes or sudden drops. Once optimized and scaled, ROI remained steady, and traffic quality held strong even as volumes increased.
This case clearly demonstrates that Mexico is a GEO with real long-term potential, provided you understand the market, test systematically, analyze your data, and work with a strong brand.
If you also want to test, scale, and profit at this level, now’s the perfect time to join
PIN-UP Partners — the leading affiliate program and direct advertiser in the iGaming industry.
