What a first-time deposit really costs in crypto
Cost per FTD is the number everyone quotes and almost nobody defines the same way. Here is how the arithmetic actually decomposes.
Ask five exchanges what they pay per first-time depositor and you will get five numbers between $40 and $300. The spread is not because some are better buyers. It is because they are measuring different events, in different GEOs, with different attribution windows.
Decomposing the number
Cost per FTD is a product of four rates, and it is worth carrying all four rather than the headline. On Tier 1 push traffic in this vertical, the chain typically looks like this:
- Click-through on the ad, around 4.1% on push, 2.8% on in-page push, well under 1% on display.
- Click to registration, highly creative-dependent, but 6–11% is a normal band for an exchange with a short signup.
- Registration to deposit, around 21.7% platform-wide in crypto, and this is the step that moves most when you change GEO tier.
- Deposit to qualifying deposit, if your CPA definition has a minimum. This one quietly halves many reported numbers.
Multiply those out against your CPM and the result is a range, not a point. A $118 average FTD cost on Tier 1 is a real figure, but it hides campaigns clearing at $70 and campaigns clearing at $190 in the same week.
Where the money actually leaks
Three leaks account for most of the gap between a good buyer and a poor one, and none of them are bidding problems.
- 01Attribution window mismatch. Your tracker fires on a 7-day window; your finance team reports on calendar month. Deposits that land on day 6 of a campaign started on the 28th disappear from the campaign's ledger entirely.
- 02Unfiltered invalid traffic counted in the denominator. If IVT is running at 1.4% post-filter but 9% pre-filter, and you are reconciling against pre-filter numbers, every ratio in your model is wrong.
- 03Zone-level variance treated as noise. Two zones inside the same GEO and format routinely differ by 3× on registration-to-deposit. Averaged together they look like a mediocre campaign; separated, one is your best source and one should be off.
If you cannot state your FTD cost by zone, you do not have an FTD cost. You have a blended average that will move for reasons you cannot see.
Getting to a number you can bid on
Return deposit value on the postback, not just the event. Once value is flowing back, you can bid to ROAS rather than to a fixed CPA, and the zone-level differences stop being a reporting curiosity and start being a budget instruction. That is the point at which the headline number stops mattering. You are no longer trying to hit an average, you are trying to buy the distribution's right tail.