Client under NDA. Market, product and timeline are real; figures are rounded and shared with the client’s consent.
The situation
A licensed sportsbook that had launched in Brazil eleven months before we met. Spend was healthy, the brand was visible around the Brasileirão calendar, and registrations were arriving at a rate the team was proud of. Deposits were not. Reg2Dep sat at 8.9%: nine players in a hundred who finished a registration ever reached a confirmed deposit. Cost per FTD had drifted up every month since launch, and the internal explanation was that the creative had fatigued and the market had become more expensive.
Organic was close to zero. Content had been translated from the English site by an agency, ranked for nothing a Brazilian punter actually types, and the domain had no topical footprint beyond the brand name.
The diagnosis
The audit took two weeks. The creative was fine. The cashier was not.
- Pix was third in the payment list, below two international card options. In a market where Pix is how people pay for everything, the method 70%+ of players were looking for was below the fold on mobile.
- No recovery path on a failed transaction. A declined card or an expired Pix code dropped the player on a generic error page with no retry, no alternative method and no explanation. Session recordings showed players trying twice, then leaving.
- Minimum deposit shown only after the failure. Players entered an amount, were told it was too low, and had to start over.
- KYC before the first deposit, demanded with no explanation of how long verification would take.
- Registration itself was eleven fields. Four of them were needed on day one.
Paid was being optimised to cost per registration, which is exactly why cheap, low-intent registrations kept flowing into a cashier that lost them.
What we did
- Month 1. Rebuilt the deposit flow: Pix first, amount validation before submit, a one-tap retry with an alternative method on any failure, and the minimum shown up front. Registration cut from eleven fields to four, with KYC moved to withdrawal.
- Month 2. Rebuilt paid to optimise on FTD and 30-day redeposit instead of registrations. Search and in-app campaigns restructured by state and by sport; football, volleyball and UFC got their own funnels and their own landing pages.
- Months 2–3. Replaced the translated content engine with two Brazilian writers who bet. New topical clusters around match previews, odds explainers and Pix-specific payment guides, in Portuguese written for São Paulo rather than for Lisbon.
- Months 3–7. Digital PR with Brazilian sports publishers, a clean link programme, and weekly cohort reporting reconciled against the platform rather than the ad dashboards.
The numbers
Seven months, measured from the day the new cashier went live.
- Reg2Dep: 8.9% → 21.4% (2.4×). Most of the gain arrived in the first six weeks, from the cashier alone.
- Cost per FTD: −41%. Spend stayed flat; the same budget bought more depositing players because fewer of them were lost after the click.
- Organic sessions: +312%, from a base that was almost entirely brand search. Organic FTDs became a material line in the monthly report by month five.
- Deposit completion on mobile: +58% — the single change with the largest effect on the whole account.
What we’d do differently
We spent the first three weeks on the paid account because that was what the brief said was broken. The cashier findings were in the audit, but we let the client’s framing set the order of work. If we had shipped the deposit flow first and touched paid second, the cost-per-FTD improvement would have landed a month earlier and the paid restructure would have started from clean data. The lesson we now apply on every engagement: fix the leak closest to the money before you buy more traffic to pour into it.
The client believed the problem was creative. The audit found the cashier: Pix third in the list, no recovery path on failed transactions.