Glossary — iGaming Affiliate Tracking Terms

A

Affiliate: A marketing partner who drives traffic and players to an iGaming operator in exchange for performance-based commission. Affiliates range from independent content sites and comparison portals to large media networks. They are paid only when their referred players take a measurable action — a registration, first deposit or ongoing gross revenue.
Affiliate Network: An intermediary that connects multiple affiliates with multiple operators under one tracking and payment platform. Networks aggregate offers, standardise reporting and handle commission payouts. Some iGaming operators run private in-house programmes instead, but networks remain common for smaller affiliates seeking access to many brands.
API (Application Programming Interface): A documented interface that lets two systems exchange data programmatically. In iGaming affiliate platforms, the API is how the operator pulls clicks, registrations, FTDs, deposits, NGR and commission data into its own data warehouse or BI tools. A strong, well-documented API is one of the clearest signals of a modern, integration-friendly platform.
Attribution: The process of assigning credit for a conversion to one or more marketing sources. Most iGaming platforms default to last-click attribution: the affiliate whose link the player last clicked before depositing receives the commission. Attribution windows (how long a click stays valid) typically range from 30 to 180 days.
Audit Log: A timestamped record of who changed what inside the affiliate platform — deal adjustments, commission overrides, manual approvals, payment exports. Audit logs are essential for financial reconciliation and for meeting regulator and licensing requirements. A platform without good audit logs is a compliance risk.

B

Bonus Abuse: Behaviour where a player (sometimes coordinated with an affiliate) games promotional offers — opening multiple accounts, exploiting wagering loopholes, or churning low-value sign-ups for bonus payouts without generating real revenue. Modern affiliate platforms detect bonus-abuse patterns and either flag the traffic or strip commissions tied to abusive players.

C

Chargeback: When a player disputes a deposit with their bank or card issuer and the funds are forcibly returned to them. Chargebacks reduce operator revenue and, in iGaming affiliate accounting, typically reduce NGR — which can roll back commissions already paid to affiliates. High-chargeback affiliate sources are often flagged as risky traffic.
Click Fraud: Artificially inflated click traffic with no real intent — typically bots, click farms, or scripted hits — designed to pad affiliate dashboards. Modern affiliate platforms use anomaly detection on click-to-registration ratios, IP repetition, device fingerprints and source-quality scoring to filter these out before commissions are awarded.
Click ID: A unique identifier appended to a tracking link (commonly `?clickid=…`) that follows the player through registration and beyond. Click IDs let the operator’s downstream systems — CRM, BI, payments — attribute every event back to the originating affiliate click, even if the player completes the journey on a different device or after a long delay.
Commission: The payment an operator makes to an affiliate for a qualifying player or revenue stream. Most iGaming commission structures fall into three families: CPA (one-off per FTD), RevShare (% of NGR), or hybrid (a smaller CPA plus a lower revenue share). Custom tiers and brand-specific overrides are common.
Conversion: Any tracked action an affiliate is paid for. In iGaming the canonical conversion event is the FTD, but conversion can also mean a registration, KYC completion, second deposit or qualifying staked amount. Modern platforms let operators define multi-stage conversion events with separate commission rules.
Cookie Tracking: The original web-attribution method: a small file written to the player’s browser when they click an affiliate link, read back when they register or deposit. Cookie tracking is increasingly unreliable due to ITP, privacy browsers and cross-device journeys, which is why most serious iGaming platforms now layer in server-to-server (S2S) and fingerprint tracking as backups.
CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): A flat one-off commission paid for each qualifying player, typically triggered by FTD plus a minimum deposit or wager threshold. CPA gives affiliates predictable income but exposes operators to negative ROI if the player churns quickly. CPA deals are usually capped by country, brand and player quality criteria.

D

Deep Link: A tracking link that drops the player directly onto a specific landing page — a game page, promo page or sport — rather than the operator homepage. Deep links dramatically improve conversion rates because the player arrives where they intended to go, with click-ID preserved through the path.
DOI (Double Opt-In): A registration flow where the player must verify their email address (or phone) before the account becomes active. DOI is required by some regulators and is more common in EU markets. It reduces fake-account fraud but lowers raw registration numbers, which affects how operators count "qualifying" conversions.

F

Fingerprint Tracking: A cookieless attribution technique that builds a probabilistic identifier from browser, device and network signals (user-agent, screen size, timezone, IP range, font set). Used as a backup when cookies are blocked or expired. Quality varies — modern privacy browsers actively spoof fingerprint signals.
FTD (First Time Deposit): The single most important conversion event in iGaming affiliate tracking: the moment a referred player makes their first real-money deposit. CPA commissions almost always trigger off FTD plus a minimum-deposit threshold. Platforms that cannot reliably attribute FTD to the originating click are not viable for iGaming operators.

G

Geo-Targeting: The practice of restricting tracking links, commission rules and creative assets by country or jurisdiction. Required by gambling licensing — for example, a sportsbook licensed only in Sweden must not accept traffic to its Swedish brand from countries where it has no licence. Strong platforms enforce geo rules at the link, registration and commission layers.
GGR (Gross Gaming Revenue): Total amount wagered by players, minus the amount returned to them as winnings. GGR is the headline operator revenue figure before any costs, taxes, fees or bonuses are deducted. Affiliate commissions are almost never paid on GGR directly — operators always work in NGR (net of bonus, fees and tax).

H

House Edge: The statistical advantage built into each game in favour of the operator, expressed as a percentage of every wagered unit. House edge drives long-run GGR. A 2% house-edge slot returns 98% to players (RTP) on average; the remaining 2% becomes the operator’s gross gaming revenue, from which affiliate commissions are eventually paid.
Hybrid Deal: A commission structure that combines a smaller CPA payment on FTD with an ongoing RevShare percentage on NGR. Hybrid deals balance affiliate cashflow predictability (the CPA) with longer-term upside (the RevShare). Most large affiliate partnerships in mature iGaming markets are hybrid.

I

Impression: A view of an affiliate creative — a banner, embedded widget, comparison-table row — without a click. Impression data is mostly used for funnel diagnostics (click-through rate) rather than commission, because almost no iGaming programmes pay on impressions alone due to fraud risk.

K

KYC (Know Your Customer): The regulatory process of verifying a player’s identity, age, address and source of funds before they are allowed to deposit or withdraw above certain thresholds. KYC completion is sometimes a commission gate: operators may not pay CPA until a player has passed KYC, to reduce fraud and bonus-abuse exposure.

L

Last-Click Attribution: The dominant attribution model in iGaming affiliate tracking: full credit for a conversion goes to whichever affiliate link the player clicked most recently before depositing. Simple, auditable and easy to dispute. Multi-touch models exist but are rare in regulated iGaming because they complicate commission calculation.
Lifetime Value (LTV): The expected total net revenue a single player will generate for an operator over their lifetime. LTV drives how much an operator can afford to pay in CPA for a new player. Operators with strong retention and high LTV can pay aggressive CPAs; operators with churn-heavy traffic must rely on RevShare.

M

Multi-Brand Programme: An affiliate setup where one operator runs several distinct brands (often across casino, sportsbook, poker and bingo) under one platform account. Strong iGaming platforms support per-brand commission rules, per-brand affiliate portals, brand-level reporting and isolated geo controls without duplicating affiliate accounts.

N

Negative Carryover: A RevShare clause where a month of negative NGR (player wins exceed losses) carries forward and reduces the affiliate’s share in the following month, rather than being reset to zero. Operators favour negative carryover; affiliates strongly prefer "no carryover". The negotiation outcome is a key commercial term in any RevShare deal.
NGR (Net Gaming Revenue): GGR minus operator-side costs — bonus expense, payment-processing fees, gaming-duty tax and (in some models) chargebacks. NGR is the figure RevShare commissions are calculated on. Different operators define NGR differently, so the specific NGR formula is one of the most important things to verify when negotiating a RevShare deal.

O

Operator: The licensed gambling company that runs the casino, sportsbook, poker room, bingo site or lottery. The operator pays affiliate commissions out of its own revenue. In multi-brand structures, one operator entity may run several player-facing brands under separate licences.

P

Pixel: A 1×1 transparent image (or invisible iframe) embedded on a confirmation page that fires an HTTP request back to the affiliate platform when loaded — signalling a conversion. Pixels are legacy tracking; serious iGaming platforms have largely replaced them with server-to-server (S2S) postbacks, which are harder to spoof.
Player Lifecycle: The journey from first click through registration, FTD, repeat deposits, VIP status (or churn) and eventual reactivation. Modern iGaming affiliate platforms expose lifecycle-stage visibility per player so operators can analyse where each affiliate’s traffic stalls — and price CPA or RevShare deals based on long-run player value.
Postback URL: A server-to-server HTTP callback that the operator’s system fires to the affiliate platform when a conversion event occurs (registration, FTD, deposit, KYC, etc.). Postbacks carry the click ID so the affiliate platform can attribute reliably without relying on browser cookies. The backbone of S2S tracking.

R

RevShare (Revenue Share): A commission model in which the affiliate earns an ongoing percentage of the NGR generated by the players they referred, for as long as those players keep playing. Typical iGaming RevShare ranges from 20% to 45%, sometimes tiered by volume. Higher long-term upside than CPA but slower cashflow.

S

S2S Tracking (Server-to-Server): The dominant modern attribution method: operator and affiliate platforms exchange conversion events directly over HTTP postbacks, with no reliance on browser cookies. S2S is more reliable in privacy-restricted environments, harder to spoof and works for mobile-app and cross-device journeys. Any modern iGaming affiliate platform must support it.
Self-Excluded Player: A player who has voluntarily blocked their own access to gambling, either at the operator or via a national register (GAMSTOP in the UK, ROFUS in Denmark, etc.). Affiliates must not market to self-excluded players. iGaming-aware platforms check incoming traffic against operator self-exclusion lists at registration and surface flagged sign-ups for review.
Sub-Affiliate: An affiliate recruited and managed by another affiliate (the master affiliate). The master receives a percentage of the sub-affiliate’s commission as a referral fee. Multi-level sub-affiliate hierarchies are common in mature iGaming networks. Platforms must support parent-child reporting and commission flow-through cleanly.

T

Tier (Commission Tier): A volume-based step in a RevShare or CPA deal where the rate increases once the affiliate hits a threshold — number of FTDs in a month, total NGR, or qualifying player count. Tiered deals incentivise affiliates to push volume and are easy to model in commission rule builders that support condition-based logic.
Tracking Link: The URL an affiliate uses to send players to an operator. Encodes the affiliate ID, optional sub-affiliate ID, campaign tag, click ID and frequently a deep-link target. The link redirects through the platform’s click handler, sets the attribution cookie / click ID, and forwards the player onward.
Turnover: The total amount staked by players over a period, gross of any wins. Also called handle. Some affiliate deals (especially in sportsbook) are calculated on turnover rather than NGR, with a very small percentage paid per unit staked. Volatile for affiliates because turnover does not adjust for player wins.

U

UTM Parameter: Standardised URL query parameters (`utm_source`, `utm_campaign`, `utm_medium`, `utm_content`, `utm_term`) used to tag inbound traffic for analytics. iGaming affiliate platforms typically capture UTM values at click time and surface them alongside click ID for campaign-level performance reporting.

W

White Label: A platform configuration where the affiliate portal, communication and reporting interface are fully rebranded with the operator’s identity — custom domain, colours, logo, emails. Affiliates see only the operator brand, not the underlying software vendor. A signal of mature platform customisability and a frequent operator procurement requirement.