iGaming affiliate glossary

60 terms in plain English — the vocabulary an affiliate contract, a tracking platform or a program manager will use at you without explaining. Where a term needs more than a paragraph, the definition links to the guide that works it through.

A

Admin fee: A fixed percentage or amount the operator deducts from revenue before your share is calculated. A 10 per cent admin fee quietly turns an advertised 40 per cent revenue share into roughly 36 per cent of the real figure.
Affiliate disclosure: A clear statement that the publisher earns commission from links on the page. It is required by advertising regulators in most markets and expected by search platforms on any page carrying monetised links.
Affiliate manager: The person at the program who approves your application, sets your terms and handles disputes. Their judgement, not an algorithm, usually decides whether a new site is accepted.
Affiliate network: A company that aggregates many operators' affiliate programs into one account, one dashboard and one payment. It simplifies administration but adds an intermediary between you and the operator's actual terms.
AI Overviews: Generated summaries shown above traditional search results for many informational queries. They absorb much of the demand for simple definitional content, which is exactly the content most affiliate sites used to rank with.
Attribution window: The period during which a conversion can still be credited to your referral. It is set by the program, not by you, and is often shorter than the cookie duration implies.

B

Bonus abuse: Extracting value from promotions in ways the operator's terms forbid, including multi-accounting and coordinated low-risk play. Publishing instructions for it breaches almost every affiliate contract and several advertising codes.
Brand bidding: Buying paid search ads on an operator's own brand name. It is prohibited by most affiliate contracts and is one of the most common reasons an established affiliate account is closed.
Bundling: Combining several of an operator's brands or verticals into one revenue pool for commission purposes. It sounds convenient but lets losses on one brand offset gains on another before you are paid.

C

Chargeback: A reversed payment where a player disputes their deposit with their bank or card issuer. Programs generally claw back any commission attached to the reversed transaction.
Churn: The rate at which referred players stop being active. High churn favours CPA deals; low churn is what makes a revenue share contract genuinely valuable over time.
Click ID: A unique identifier the affiliate platform assigns to each click on your tracking link. It is the key that later ties a signup or deposit back to the specific click that produced it.
Click-through rate: The proportion of people who see a link or listing and actually click it. In search it is impressions to clicks; on your own page it is page views to outbound clicks.
Content drip: Publishing queued articles on a steady automated schedule rather than in bursts. Done honestly it stamps the real publication date; used to fake freshness by re-dating old pages it achieves nothing at all.
Conversion rate: The share of visitors or clicks completing a defined step, such as click to signup or signup to first deposit. Quoting a single conversion rate without naming which two steps it spans is meaningless.
Cookie duration: How long after a click you remain credited for a player's signup, commonly 30 days, 60 days, or advertised as lifetime. Lifetime cookies still fail if the visitor clears storage or switches device.
CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): A fixed one-off payment for each qualifying depositing player you refer. It is predictable and pays immediately, but you receive nothing further no matter how long or how profitably that player continues. Read the guide
Creative approval: The operator's sign-off on the wording, images and offer details you publish about them. In regulated markets it is a compliance requirement flowing from the operator's licence, not a courtesy.

D

Deduction: Any amount removed from gross revenue before your commission is calculated, including bonuses, payment fees, gaming duty, fraud losses and administrative charges. The list of permitted deductions is the part of a contract worth reading twice.
Deep link: A tracking link pointing to a specific page on the operator's site rather than its homepage, such as a particular promotion or game. It reduces the number of steps between your reader and the action you recommended.
Doorway page: A page or site created mainly to capture a search query and funnel visitors elsewhere, typically as near-identical variants across locations or keywords. Google treats these as spam regardless of how useful the destination is.

E

E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust — the qualities Google's quality raters assess, with Trust the most important. It is not a ranking factor in itself, but the signals it describes are what the ranking systems approximate.
EPC (earnings per click): Total commission divided by the number of outbound clicks that produced it, usually expressed per hundred clicks. It is the cleanest single measure of whether a traffic source is worth keeping.

F

FTD (First Time Depositor): A referred player who makes their first real-money deposit with the operator. FTD is the standard conversion event for CPA deals and the point at which a click finally becomes worth something.

G

Geo-blocking: Preventing access from countries an operator cannot legally serve. If your traffic is largely from blocked territories, your clicks will never convert no matter how good the content is.
Geo-targeting: Serving a visitor a link, offer or page based on their detected country. Done correctly it sends each reader to a product actually available to them; done badly it silently destroys your conversion rate.
GGR (Gross Gaming Revenue): Total player stakes minus total player winnings, before any deductions. It is the top of the revenue chain and is nearly always larger than the NGR your commission is actually calculated on.

H

Helpful content system: Google's ongoing assessment of whether a site's content is written primarily for people rather than for search engines. It is a continuous signal, not a one-off update, and it evaluates the site as a whole.
Hybrid deal: A commission structure combining a smaller CPA payment on each new depositor with an ongoing revenue share on the same players. It trades some upfront cash for some long-term upside. Read the guide

I

In-house program: An affiliate program run directly by the operator or its group rather than through a network. Terms are usually more negotiable and the relationship more direct, but you manage each one separately.

L

Last-click attribution: The default rule crediting the most recent affiliate click before a signup with the full conversion. If a player reads your review and then clicks a rival's link, that rival is paid.
Licence jurisdiction: The regulator under whose authority an operator is permitted to accept players from a given market. Promoting an operator into a market it is not licensed for is both a contract breach and a regulatory problem.

M

Master affiliate: The referring party in a sub-affiliate relationship, sometimes also used for an affiliate managing a network of smaller sites under one account. The master affiliate's own commission rate is unaffected by the referral.
Media pack: A short document describing your sites, markets, traffic sources and audience, sent with an affiliate application. A credible one-page media pack noticeably improves approval rates for new affiliates.
Minimum payout: The balance you must reach before the program will transfer money, commonly EUR 100. Below the threshold the balance simply rolls into the next month, which is a frequent explanation for a missing payment.

N

Negative carryover: A contract term under which a month of negative net revenue carries forward as a deficit against your next month's earnings. One large player win can therefore produce several consecutive months of zero commission. Read the guide
NGR (Net Gaming Revenue): The operator's gross gaming revenue after deductions such as bonus costs, payment processing fees, gaming duty and sometimes an administrative fee. Almost every revenue share deal is calculated on NGR, not on player deposits or stakes.

O

Organic traffic: Visitors arriving from unpaid search results. It is the slowest channel for a new affiliate site to build and the hardest for a competitor to take away once established.

P

Paid traffic: Visitors bought through advertising platforms. For gambling offers it usually requires platform certification per country, and many programs restrict or forbid it outright.
Payment schedule: When the program closes the month and when it pays, typically monthly around the fifteenth to the twentieth for the previous period. Cut-off dates matter more than payment dates when you are planning cash flow.
Pixel tracking: Browser-side conversion tracking using an image or script fired on a confirmation page. It is simpler than a postback but breaks under ad blockers, cookie restrictions and cross-domain limits.
Player lifetime value: The total net revenue a referred player generates over their whole active life with the operator. It is the number that decides whether revenue share beats a given CPA offer.
Postback (server-to-server): A server-side call the affiliate platform makes to your own endpoint when a tracked event such as a signup or deposit occurs. It reports conversions without relying on the visitor's browser or cookies. Read the guide
Pre-lander: An intermediate page between your content and the operator, used to qualify or warm the visitor. In regulated markets it must follow the same advertising rules as any other page you publish.

Q

Qualifying deposit: The minimum deposit, wagering or activity a referred player must complete before a CPA payment is triggered. Reading this definition in the contract is how you avoid counting players the program will not pay for.

R

Remittance advice: The document confirming which invoices or periods a payment covers. Keeping every one makes reconciling a year of small, irregular affiliate payments possible rather than painful.
Responsible gambling messaging: The age restriction, risk warning and help-service signposting that must accompany gambling promotion. Regulators treat its absence as an advertising breach by the operator, which is why programs enforce it on affiliates.
Revenue share: A commission model paying you an agreed percentage of the net gaming revenue your referred players generate, usually for as long as they remain active. Rates commonly run between 20 and 45 per cent and often rise with volume. Read the guide

S

Scaled content abuse: Generating many pages primarily to manipulate rankings rather than to help readers, whether by automation, mass translation or thin templating. Volume alone does not trigger it, but volume without a distinct purpose per page usually does.
Self-billing invoice: An invoice the program issues on your behalf for the commission it owes you, which is the norm in iGaming affiliate marketing. You should still check it, keep it, and reconcile it against the statement.
Site reputation abuse: Publishing third-party commercial content on an established domain to exploit that domain's standing, sometimes called parasite SEO. First-party involvement does not change the classification.
Sponsored link attribute: The rel="sponsored" value marking a link as paid or commercial, usually combined with nofollow. Search engines expect it on affiliate links, and omitting it across a site is a recognised policy exposure.
Sub-affiliate: An affiliate who signed up to a program through another affiliate's referral link. The referring affiliate earns a small percentage of the sub-affiliate's commission, paid by the program rather than taken from the sub-affiliate. Read the guide
SubID: A free-text parameter you add to a tracking link to label its origin, such as the page, site or campaign it came from. It is the only practical way to learn which of your pages actually produce depositing players. Read the guide

T

Tracking link: The URL that identifies you as the referring affiliate and carries any parameters you add. Every commission you ever earn depends on the player having arrived through one of these, unmodified.
Traffic source: Where your visitors come from, such as organic search, social, email, video or paid media. Programs ask for it on every application, and misdescribing it is grounds for termination.

V

VAT reverse charge: A mechanism in cross-border business-to-business services under which the recipient rather than the supplier accounts for VAT. It is why many affiliate invoices show no VAT and carry a reverse charge note instead.

W

Wagering requirement: The number of times a bonus amount must be staked before winnings can be withdrawn. It is the single most important term in any offer you describe to readers, and it must be stated accurately.
White label: A brand operating on another company's licence and platform. Several apparently distinct casinos can therefore share one affiliate program, one set of terms and one revenue pool.

Z

Zero-click search: A search answered on the results page, producing an impression but no visit. It explains why impressions can rise while sessions stay flat, and why thin explainer pages have stopped delivering traffic.