Case Study: $17,523 Into Paid Social for 15K Conversions

Case Study Breakdown · Issue 8

Hi, I’m Peter.

This issue’s case comes from the PropellerAds official blog: an affiliate running game offers, with the same offers and the same 30 days, ran Paid Social and Popunder side by side.

Issue 4 covered Paid Social getting 42,000 payments in Southeast Asia in 30 days. This is the same series, and this time it goes head to head with Pop.

Test setup

Data from the PropellerAds official blog, published August 17, 2026.

01 First, What Paid Social Is

Paid Social is a new format PropellerAds launched this June. You buy users in social feeds directly from the PA dashboard.

You don’t need an ad account on a social platform or separate creatives. If you have a landing page, you can run it.

The Social traffic that used to sit under Onclick is still there. That’s organic traffic from bloggers and publishers, and you can run both together.

In the dashboard you pick the format: Organic Social sits under Onclick, and Paid Social stands on its own

The first batch opened 11 countries, including PH, BR, BD, TH and ZA. The platform says the best fits are games, Finance and Mobile Software.

It has just one problem: it’s expensive.

The affiliate pays for impressions but earns on the step where the offer settles. Game offers mostly settle on deposits or registrations, with several layers in between.

So what you should compare is how much that last step costs each time.

02 Look Only at the Second Conversion

CPA Goal means you name a price and the system finds traffic at that price. This affiliate set install as the goal.

Four steps: buy at the install price → ignore installs → watch the action after entering the app → close the expensive zones

The system buys installs at the same price, so every zone looks the same at the install step.

To tell good from bad, you have to look one step further.

The result: Paid Social’s target action cost $1.16 each, Popunder’s $1.87.

Zones inside Paid Social also vary. The winning combination is this format plus the zones that hit the second conversion.

03 Once You Find the Combination, Stay In and Scale

After finding the combination, he stayed in Paid Social and kept adding budget, giving most of it to the strongest few zones rather than chasing new traffic types.

After scaling, the cost per target action held steady at $1.16 for 30 days. That shows these zones really convert, not lucky zones that die as soon as you add volume.

It only counts as found if it holds after you scale.

04 Head to Head with Pop

Same offers, same 30 days:

Results card: cost held flat across the whole month

The same money buys many more impressions on Pop, but it takes a lot of impressions to get one action. Paid Social converts densely enough that the extra CPM pays for itself.

The official explanation: the ad appears in a social feed, where users are there to scroll and tap anyway.

The expensive impressions buy people who are more willing to act.

05 Three Takeaways

1. Higher CPM, denser conversions: Paid Social's CPM may be higher, but conversion density rises with it.
2. Target action 38% cheaper: same offers, 38% cheaper than Pop.
3. The premium has to earn itself back: for deep events such as deposits, install plus action, or real-person registrations, the premium pays back. If the payout depends on what users do after the click, CPM is not the number to optimize.

Oleksandr Shovkun, head of the PropellerAds sales team, said:

Don’t judge this traffic by the conversion you set as the goal. Set a second event and compare zones by that. If the offer settles on a click or a very simple lead, the higher CPM won’t pay back.

06 My Take

Put this issue next to Issue 4:

Both times, CPM is higher and the cost per action is lower. In Issue 4 I wrote one line: CPM is only the price of the road.

This issue goes one step further: to judge zones, it doesn’t even look at the goal conversion, but at the step after it.

Cutting zones and putting budget into the strong ones is what I do every day on PA, and zone-level bid adjustment is the move I value most.

I’ve been burned by one thing: the same zone makes money in TH and loses in ZA, and looking at them mixed together kills zones by mistake. This case mixed several countries. If I were copying it, I’d split by GEO first, then compare zones by the second conversion.

If you have game or Finance offers, you can choose Paid Social when creating a new campaign in PA and do a small first round with a landing page.