When operators evaluate casino platforms, the conversation usually runs through game counts, payment integrations, and uptime SLAs. Those matter. But they do not predict whether a media-buy campaign pays back in month 5 or month 18 — or does not pay back at all.
The operators we work with — all running live Canadian-geo media buy, all generating over $2.5M GGR — have converged on a different evaluation framework. Five metrics that move the actual economics of a paid-acquisition brand.
1. Click → Registration
This is where the economics of a media-buy campaign are decided before a single player makes any choice about your product. On paid traffic, you are paying for every click. If 7% of those clicks become registered accounts — a number we see consistently on legacy platforms — you are burning most of your acquisition budget before the onboarding funnel begins.
The difference is not ad creative or targeting. It is platform architecture: install flow friction, one-tap registration, how quickly the platform puts something in front of a new user. In our live benchmark dataset, the spread on Click2Reg runs from 6.7% to 59.5% across four platforms on identical Canadian media-buy traffic. That is not a conversion optimisation gap. That is a different category of product.
2. Registration → First Deposit
A registered user who never deposits is a cost, not a customer. Reg2Dep is where product quality starts to show in the numbers. Onboarding UX, bonus trigger logic, first-impression design, and time-to-first-game all compress into this one rate.
In the same dataset, Reg2Dep ranges from 13.7% to 43.2%. An operator running $100K/month in media buy on the weaker platform is converting fewer than 14 in 100 registrations into paying customers. That is not a retention problem. It is an activation problem, and the platform is where it lives.
3. ARPU in Month 1
Month-1 ARPU is the payback driver. Operators running media buy at scale understand that the first 30 days define cohort economics. If the platform cannot activate a player's full spend potential in that window — through CRM, re-engagement, personalised bonus triggers, and deposit-count optimisation — every subsequent month is recovery, not profit.
The live benchmark spread: $80 to $110 per player in month 1, on the same traffic type and geo. That $30 difference, compounded across thousands of FTDs per month, changes the payback timeline by weeks.
4. 10th Deposit Rate
Getting a player to their tenth deposit is the long-term retention signal. It means the platform's CRM, push notifications, and re-engagement logic are working across a sustained period. It also separates platforms designed for sustainable brand building from platforms designed for short-term player extraction.
A 10th deposit rate of 6–8% produces one kind of cohort. A rate of 12% produces a different business. In our dataset, the spread is exactly that: 6.3% vs 12.2% across comparable platforms on the same traffic.
5. 12-Month LTV and Payback Month
The four metrics above collapse into two numbers: how much does a player return over 12 months, and what month does the campaign pay for itself?
In the benchmark data we published at /results/, LTV at 12 months runs from $435 to $550 across the platforms in the dataset. Payback month is 5 vs 6 — with one platform in the set returning negative ROI over 12 months on identical media-buy traffic. The platform with the best LTV and earliest payback is not necessarily the one with the most impressive brochure. It is the one built for paid acquisition, not built for SEO-and-affiliate traffic then applied to paid.
How to use this framework
Ask any platform vendor for these five numbers. Ask what geo and traffic source they came from. Ask what GGR the brands in the dataset were generating. If they cannot answer all three questions, the numbers are projections, not production data.
Every number in the Turbo Stars benchmark table came from live Canadian-geo media-buy operations. All brands in the dataset exceeded $2.5M GGR at the time of measurement. The methodology is published on the page. That is the standard to hold any platform comparison to.