Anyone actually optimized sports gambling ads to cut CPA?

So I’ve been messing around with sports gambling ads for a while, and recently I started wondering if anyone else is dealing with the same thing I was: the feeling that no matter how “smart” your setup is, the CPA just keeps creeping up. It’s weird because everyone online makes it sound like there are these simple tricks that magically fix everything. In reality, it felt more like trial and error and trying not to burn my budget in the process.At one point I genuinely thought maybe sports gambling ads just have a natural ceiling and that’s why I wasn’t getting the returns I expected. But after swapping notes with a few peers and running some of my own experiments, things started clicking a bit more. None of it was instant, and definitely nothing felt “guru-ish,” but a few tweaks slowly made a difference.One of my biggest pain points was figuring out where the ads were actually leaking money. I kept thinking it had to be the targeting or maybe the ad creatives, but sometimes it wasn’t either of those. For me, the real problem was inconsistency—some placements worked great for two days, then tanked for the next three. I’d end up pausing campaigns, restarting them, or switching audiences too fast because I kept assuming a drop meant something was broken. Turns out, half of that chaos was just me overreacting.After a while, I started treating everything like a slow experiment instead of a firefight. I tested one change at a time. This sounds obvious, but I wasn’t doing it before. Sports gambling ads respond weirdly to tiny changes—sometimes swapping the ad format made more difference than rewriting the whole creative. I didn’t expect that. I also noticed that certain audiences only work well on certain days, which I never paid attention to until someone pointed it out in another thread.Another thing I learned the hard way: creatives get old way faster than you’d expect. In the gambling niche, people scroll past the same style of ad so quickly that even a small variation can reset performance. I used to recycle the same designs because they “worked last month,” but that was probably why my CPA kept going up. I don’t refresh them daily or anything, but having a small rotation ready really helped.I tried going heavy with analytic dashboards, but honestly, most of that stuff just overwhelmed me. What helped more was stepping back and asking simple questions like: which placements are draining money, which ones send decent users, and where am I getting people who actually sign up instead of window-shop. When I looked at it from that angle, things got clearer. I dropped some flashy placements that looked good in impressions but never converted, and my CPA immediately got healthier.One thing someone suggested (kind of casually) that ended up helping was checking how other people approach optimization. I’m not talking about copying anything but more like seeing what patterns others notice. I came across a breakdown that explained different ways people try to  optimize sports gambling ads  and some of it lined up with what I was testing. It didn’t magically fix everything, but it did make me rethink how I matched my creatives with certain audiences.A small but surprisingly strong insight for me was testing softer angles. I used to write ads like they needed to “pull” people in right away, but that came across as too pushy for this niche. More relaxed wording felt more natural and cut down wasted clicks. People don’t want to feel like they’re being sold to. They want something that feels relatable or interesting, not loud.Also, pacing matters. If there’s anything I wish I understood earlier, it’s that running sports gambling ads is more like managing mood swings than crunching numbers. Performance jumps around, and sometimes the best thing you can do is not overreact for 48 hours. I used to panic-pause ads, which hurt more than it helped.Looking back, the improvements I got weren’t from one big hack. They came from stacking a bunch of small habits: rotating creatives, slowing down changes, trimming the bad placements, and matching angles to audience mood. Nothing fancy, nothing extreme. Just simple adjustments I didn’t take seriously at first.If you’re stuck with rising CPA or you feel like ROI is all over the place, my honest view is this: don’t expect one trick to save the day. Just pick one or two things to tweak at a time and give them room to breathe. Sports gambling ads can be unpredictable, but they do respond when you stop trying to force everything at once.