Most format comparisons you’ll read are theory. This one is a live account: four casino brands promoted in Turkey simultaneously across three Adexium formats — popunder, in-page push, and iMe Messenger — with conversions passed back via postback, so every row has a real CPA on it.
Nine campaigns, 6.15M impressions, 84K clicks, 19 tracked conversions, $28.62 blended CPA. And the most useful finding wasn’t “which format won” — it was how wildly the same format performed for different offers.
The setup
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Offers | 4 online casino brands (Brand A–D below) |
| Geo | Turkey |
| Formats | Popunder (CPM), In-Page Push (CPC), iMe Messenger (CPM) |
| Structure | One campaign per offer-format pair, 9 campaigns total |
| Tracking | S2S postback on conversion |
Every campaign name encodes the pair, so the dashboard reads as a matrix (brand names blurred):
The full scoreboard
Sorted by CPA, best at the bottom:
| Offer | Format | Impressions | Clicks | CTR | Conversions | CPA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brand B | Popunder (wl) | 24,197 | 24,197 | 100% | 1 | $70.87 |
| Brand C | In-Page Push | 2,728,340 | 3,361 | 0.12% | 1 | $70.40 |
| Brand A | iMe Messenger | 32,930 | 180 | 0.55% | 1 | $40.43 |
| Brand C | Popunder (wl) | 15,164 | 15,163 | ~100% | 1 | $30.85 |
| Brand D | iMe Messenger | 27,033 | 137 | 0.51% | 1 | $30.07 |
| Brand A | Popunder (wl) | 37,719 | 37,718 | 100% | 9 | $26.82 |
| Brand B | iMe Messenger | 19,924 | 79 | 0.40% | 1 | $24.08 |
| Brand A | In-Page Push | 2,324,080 | 2,696 | 0.12% | 4 | $6.82 |
| Brand B | In-Page Push | 948,140 | 653 | 0.07% | 0 | — |
| Total | 6,157,527 | 84,184 | 1.37% | 19 | $28.62 |
(Popunder shows ~100% CTR by design — the click is the impression. Judge it by CPA only.)
What the matrix actually shows
1. The “best format” doesn’t exist — the best pair does
In-page push produced both the cheapest line in the account (Brand A at $6.82) and one of the most expensive (Brand C at $70.40), on the same geo, same bid, same period. Ten-x spread inside one format. If this had been run as one blended “push campaign” for all four brands, the $6.82 winner would have been invisible — averaged away into a mediocre ~$25 line.
2. In-page push on micro-CPC is a reach machine
The three push campaigns bought 6M impressions at a $0.005 CPC — you pay only for the 0.07–0.12% who click. For offers whose landing page converts cold traffic (Brand A’s did), that’s an unbeatable prospecting engine. For offers that don’t (Brand B: 653 clicks, zero conversions), it’s cheap traffic to nowhere — kill the pair fast.
3. Whitelisted popunder is the volume-vs-precision dial
Popunder on source whitelists delivered conversions for all three brands that ran it, in the $26–71 CPA band. Brand A’s popunder line was the account’s conversion workhorse: 9 of the 19 total conversions at $26.82. Note its CPM: $6.4 versus $1 elsewhere — a deliberately aggressive bid on a proven whitelist beats a cheap bid on everything.
4. iMe Messenger is the consistency play
The iMe campaigns were the narrowest band in the whole test: $24–40 CPA across three different brands with no blowouts. Lower ceiling than push’s $6.82, but nothing embarrassing either — a solid “always-on” format while push and pop pairs are being sorted into winners and losers.
What happened next
The playbook wrote itself from the table:
- Scale: Brand A push ($6.82) and Brand A popunder whitelist (volume at $26.82).
- Keep: all three iMe lines as stable background volume.
- Fix or kill: Brand B push (zero conversions — new creatives or off), Brand C push and Brand B popunder (both $70+ — pause).
Takeaways
- Run offer × format matrices, not format tests. A format verdict without the offer dimension is noise — this account proves a 10x CPA spread within one format.
- Micro-CPC in-page push is the cheapest large-scale prospecting in Tier-2/3 geos — but only for offers whose funnel converts cold clicks.
- Bid up on proven whitelists. The $6.4-CPM popunder line out-converted every $1-CPM line in the account.
- 19 conversions is enough to act on when the structure is clean. You don’t need thousands of events to see a $6.82 line next to a $70 one.
Want to run the same matrix on your offers? Create your shootout on Adexium — popunder, in-page push and iMe Messenger are all available for Turkey from a single dashboard, with S2S postbacks set up in minutes.
