The CIS is often taken as an "easy geo", and people are surprised that campaign setups from Europe do not work there. What differs is not the language but the player's path to the deposit.
Messengers instead of feeds
In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan Telegram is not an extra channel but the main way content is consumed. Two things follow from that. First: sending people straight from a channel to the offer gives a cheap FTD and a dead cohort — we shut down a channel like that in the third week, when D30 activity dropped to nine percent. Second: a two-week content warm-up before the offer changes quality radically.
Betting is seasonal, casino is not
The sports vertical runs on the calendar: the season start gives a peak, the off-season a slump. Casino is flatter and more predictable month to month. If an operator enters the sportsbook for the season, it is worth planning right away how the cohort will be held after it ends, otherwise the whole peak drains away.
Payment methods decide it
Local bank cards and local wallets convert several times better than international methods. An operator that enters the region with a European set of payment methods loses the player at the last step and writes it off as traffic quality.
Language and tone
Russian covers most of the audience, but not all of it. Kazakh and Uzbek get a better response in the regions and a worse one in the capitals. Tone matters more than translation: a direct copy of English creatives reads as spam, while local examples and amounts in tenge or soms read as native.
Numbers and capacity
Across two markets we run 1,900 FTDs a month with spare capacity for another 400. The rate range in negotiations is usually 30–80 dollars depending on the vertical and the qualification threshold. With proper warm-up the redeposit share holds around sixty percent — noticeably above the average for cold traffic.
What to ask before the launch
- Whether local payment methods exist and whether they have been tested with a live deposit.
- Whether there is a warm-up or traffic goes straight to the offer.
- What is planned after the sports season ends.
A breakdown of the seasonal launch in Kazakhstan with the numbers — in case studies. Available volumes — in the section “Geos and models”.
