Search for Pinterest Ads benchmarks in the gambling vertical and you'll find plenty of cross-vertical averages, but almost no page tells you the one fact that actually matters: Pinterest's own advertising policy prohibits gambling campaigns in nearly every market. Lunio built this page anyway, because the real question for a gambling marketer isn't what Pinterest costs, it's where that budget actually goes once you accept that answer, and how much of it reaches a real depositing player instead of invalid traffic on the channels you do use. Find out how much of your Pinterest Ads budget is being wasted →
Pinterest's auction and its underlying user intent make it a structurally different environment from the one gambling marketers usually buy into. The platform runs on planning and discovery behaviour rather than high-intent, transactional search, which is precisely why gambling campaigns are excluded from it in policy terms, per Lunio's cross-platform invalid traffic rates. What follows are the only genuinely citable figures available for the formats a narrow set of permitted gambling advertisers, such as government lotteries, could technically use.
| Campaign Type | IVT Rate (Gambling, cross-platform reference) | CPM |
|---|---|---|
| Standard Pin Ads | 18.49% | $8.40 |
| Idea Ads | 18.49% | $10.10 |
| Premiere Spotlight | 18.49% | $22.40 |
The IVT figure in every row above is the gambling vertical's cross-platform average, not a Pinterest-specific measurement. On mobile vs. desktop, there isn't a reliable gambling-specific split to report either: Pinterest is a heavily mobile-first platform generally, but with no meaningful gambling advertiser population running campaigns, there's no device-level behaviour pattern worth presenting as a benchmark.
Neither Pinterest Ads nor the gambling vertical is covered in Lunio's 2026 proprietary dataset, so every figure on this page is either an external cross-vertical benchmark or a Lunio cross-platform reference point, never a direct Pinterest × gambling measurement. That gap isn't an oversight; it reflects the fact that there's effectively no gambling advertiser population running Pinterest campaigns for Lunio to monitor. Full methodology and platform coverage sit in the Lunio 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report. Calculate how much you're losing →
Pinterest's Advertising Guidelines explicitly prohibit gambling websites, gambling game apps, lotteries (with narrow exceptions), and fantasy sports or prize-based games requiring payment for entry. The only formats worth discussing, then, are the ones a tiny set of permitted advertisers, government-sponsored lotteries and a handful of brick-and-mortar casino brands, could use under prior Pinterest approval, per Lunio's industry invalid traffic statistics on gambling and other high-risk verticals.
Standard Pin Ads: the default, lowest-cost entry point at roughly $8.40 CPM (DigitalApplied, April 2026). For an eligible lottery operator, this is the format most likely to pass Pinterest's editorial review, since it doesn't require odds, bonus, or promotional messaging that would breach creative standards. Applying the 18.49% cross-platform gambling IVT reference, a meaningful share of even this low-cost format's traffic should be assumed non-human or non-genuine until measured directly.
Idea Ads: Pinterest's highest-engagement format, generating roughly 4x the saves of Standard Pins. For gambling exceptions, this format carries more creative risk, since multi-page storytelling formats invite the kind of promotional, odds-driven messaging Pinterest's guidelines restrict.
Premiere Spotlight: the platform's premium placement at $22.40 CPM, reserved for high-reach brand campaigns. This is the format a government lottery with prior approval might use around a major draw event, but at nearly three times the cost of Standard Pins, the gambling IVT reference rate translates into a materially larger absolute dollar exposure per impression.
Shopping Ads and Catalog Sales: structurally irrelevant to gambling, since there is no product catalog to drive. These formats can be excluded from any gambling media plan entirely.
Performance+ (Pinterest's automation suite): relevant only to eligible advertisers, and worth flagging precisely because it optimises against conversion events the same way Smart Bidding does elsewhere. If invalid registrations or bot-driven form fills enter a Performance+ conversion dataset, the system trains on those signals and seeks more traffic that looks like the bots rather than real players, a contamination loop that degrades performance progressively rather than in one visible event. Pinterest's Direct Links feature, which sends users straight to the advertiser's site, removes one layer of platform-side filtering, making destination-site traffic quality entirely the advertiser's own responsibility to monitor.
Pinterest's narrow gambling exceptions, government-sponsored lotteries with prior approval, happen to map closely onto the countries Lunio tracks for invalid traffic. Five of the seven permitted lottery markets, Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the UK, appear in the table below.
| Country | IVT Rate (all verticals) |
|---|---|
| United States | 8.44% |
| United Kingdom | 7.97% |
| Germany | 6.34% |
| France | 6.63% |
| Australia | 7.87% |
| Canada | 6.29% |
For the small number of eligible lottery advertisers, Germany and Canada carry the lowest baseline IVT exposure at 6.34% and 6.29% respectively, while the UK and Australia sit closer to 8%. The US isn't one of the seven permitted lottery markets at all, so its 8.44% rate is relevant only as general context, not as a Pinterest gambling benchmark. None of these figures are gambling-specific; they're Lunio's verified country-level averages across all verticals, detailed further in Lunio's ad fraud data by country.
For almost every gambling advertiser, the honest answer is that there is no Pinterest Ads budget to waste, because the campaigns can't legally run. The real exposure sits on the platforms gambling budgets actually flow to: Google Ads Search, Meta, and programmatic display. Gambling campaigns across all platforms average 18.49% invalid traffic, per the Lunio 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report, covering 2.7 billion clicks across 6 ad platforms from August 2024 to July 2025. Because the gambling conversion event is account registration, not an immediate transaction, it's structurally a lead-gen funnel, and Lunio's broader dataset shows lead-gen campaigns run 32.07% higher invalid traffic than transactional ones. Applying that uplift pushes the effective rate to roughly 24.4%.
Run the math on a mid-sized operator spending $40,000 a month, or $480,000 a year, across Google Ads and Meta gambling campaigns: at 24.4% invalid traffic, close to $117,000 of that annual budget is spent on clicks that will never reach a depositing player. Lunio's work with Funding Circle, a regulated UK lending platform running a comparably high-CPC, lead-gen paid search funnel where top terms cost £30–£40 per click, found an average invalid traffic rate of 16.84% before protection, falling to 3.13% after, an 81.41% reduction, per Lunio's Funding Circle case study. The read-across to gambling is direct: lead-gen conversion events are exactly the signal type Smart Bidding systems train on, and exactly the signal type invalid traffic contaminates most.
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Pinterest Ads isn't a gambling channel, and no benchmark figure changes that. The value in this page isn't a Pinterest CPC for your spreadsheet, it's the recognition that the budget you've redirected to Google Ads and Meta carries real invalid traffic exposure that headline benchmarks never show. Lunio measures exactly that gap, on the platforms where your gambling campaigns actually run.
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There isn't one. Pinterest's Advertising Guidelines prohibit gambling websites, gambling apps, and most lottery advertising, so there's no meaningful advertiser population generating a gambling-specific CPC. The nearest available reference is the Finance vertical's $0.80–$1.50 CPC range (AdBacklog, April 2025), but this describes a different vertical entirely and shouldn't be used to plan a gambling campaign.
No gambling-specific CTR exists for the same policy reasons. Across all Pinterest verticals, CTR averages 0.39%, rising to 0.71% for Shopping and 1.18% for Premiere Spotlight (DigitalApplied, April 2026). On any platform, an unusually high CTR against flat or falling conversions is a signal worth investigating rather than celebrating, since it often indicates clicks that aren't reaching real users.
Because gambling can't run at scale on Pinterest, invalid traffic isn't a Pinterest-specific risk for this vertical. It's a real risk on the platforms gambling budget actually flows to. Gambling campaigns average 18.49% invalid traffic across all platforms combined, rising toward 24% once the lead-gen uplift is applied, which means every CPA and CVR figure you're using to judge Google Ads or Meta performance may already be skewed by non-genuine traffic.
Lunio doesn't yet hold Pinterest-specific IVT data, but its verified all-vertical country rates show Germany at 6.34%, France at 6.63%, and the UK at 7.97%, all lower than the US at 8.44%. For the narrow set of gambling exceptions Pinterest permits, Germany and Canada carry the lowest baseline exposure of the markets where lottery advertising is allowed.