Definition
Push advertising delivers ads as notification-style messages — a small icon, a short title, a line of body text — that appear on a user's device or in their browser. Classic web push requires the user to have opted in to notifications from a site in the subscriber network; in-page push mimics the same format as a widget inside a webpage and needs no subscription.
The format is cheap, high-volume, and available across many networks, which makes it a staple of iGaming media buying.
Push works because a notification demands a glance and the copy is short enough to be read at once, so a sharp hook can earn a click from a distracted user. The trade-off is that the audience is broad and low-intent, click quality varies enormously by source zone, and the same subscriber base fatigues quickly, so creative refresh and aggressive zone-level blacklisting and whitelisting are the core of running push profitably.
In context
For iGaming, push is used mostly for casino and betting offers in Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets where cheap volume and a low cost per FTD matter more than audience precision. The workflow is: launch across a wide zone set, read the SubID-level report after enough spend, blacklist the zones producing clicks but no registrations, whitelist and scale bids on the zones that convert, and rotate fresh creatives constantly because push banners lose click-through within days on the same subscribers.
Push also carries specific quality and compliance risks. Some push inventory is low-quality or bot-heavy, so cohort analysis on registrations and deposits — not just clicks — is essential to avoid paying for volume with no value.
And push creatives are a common site of misleading claims (fake system alerts, invented win notifications, exaggerated bonuses) that breach network policy and, for licensed operators, advertising rules. Compliant push uses honest copy and still competes on the strength of the hook and the offer.
Worked example
A buyer launches a casino push campaign across 400 zones on one network. After $600 of spend, three zones account for 70% of deposits at a $42 cost per FTD while 90 zones have produced clicks and zero registrations.
The buyer blacklists the 90 dead zones, whitelists the three winners, raises bids there, and keeps a testing layer feeding new zones in.
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