Incentivised traffic is visitors who take an action — click, register, deposit — mainly because they are being rewarded for it by a third party (points, cashback, a prize entry, in-app currency, a payment) rather than out of genuine interest in the gambling product.
Definition
Incentivised traffic is visitors who take an action — click, register, deposit — mainly because they are being rewarded for it by a third party (points, cashback, a prize entry, in-app currency, a payment) rather than out of genuine interest in the gambling product. It overlaps with the rewards-affiliate model and with offerwall and rewarded-ad placements.
The users convert on the surface metric but tend to have very low intent, so they deposit rarely, retain poorly, chase bonuses, and multi-home across whichever incentive is best.
Most operator programmes restrict or prohibit incentivised traffic for gambling because it inflates registration and even deposit counts while delivering cohorts with near-zero long-term value, and because paying people to gamble raises responsible-gambling concerns.
In context
For affiliates, incentivised traffic is a category to understand and mostly avoid for gambling offers. It can produce impressive top-of-funnel numbers, but the resulting cohorts are exactly what an operator's traffic-quality assessment and bonus-cost metrics flag as low value, leading to commission clawbacks, rate cuts, or termination.
Most programmes prohibit it outright, so running it against those programmes is a terms breach as well as an economic dead end.
Where a market and a programme do permit a rewards or cashback model, it has to be structured within the rules — rewarding activity rather than losses where that framing is restricted, clear disclosure, age verification, exclusion of self-excluded and at-risk users — and even then the player quality tends to be weak. The responsible-gambling dimension matters: paying people to gamble, or to keep gambling to unlock a reward, works against safer-gambling principles and has drawn regulatory criticism.
For affiliate-facing content, the framing is that incentivised traffic converts because of a third-party reward rather than genuine interest, that it produces low-intent cohorts that deposit and retain poorly, that most gambling programmes prohibit it and treat it as a terms breach with clawbacks, that permitted rewards models must be tightly structured and still tend to deliver weak quality, and that paying people to gamble raises responsible-gambling concerns.
Worked example
An affiliate tests an offerwall source for a casino offer. Registrations spike, but the cohort's deposit rate is a tenth of its other traffic, retention is near zero, and the operator flags it as incentivised and voids the commissions under the programme's ban.
The affiliate drops the source and confirms it will not run incentivised traffic to gambling programmes.
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