Definition
Motivated or incentivised traffic is traffic where the user is given a reward — points, in-game currency, a prize entry, cash, access to locked content — in exchange for performing the action the advertiser pays for, such as installing an app, registering, or completing an offer. The user's motivation is the incentive, not genuine interest in the product, so the conversion is real in a technical sense but hollow in value: incentivised users rarely engage, retain or spend after collecting their reward.
Many advertisers explicitly prohibit incentivised traffic, and iGaming operators almost universally do, because an incentivised registration or deposit has essentially zero lifetime value while still costing a CPA payout. The prohibition is usually written into the offer terms, and violating it is grounds for rejecting conversions and terminating the affiliate.
Some verticals — casual gaming user acquisition, certain CPA offers, rewarded-video ad formats — do permit it, at correspondingly lower payouts that reflect the lower quality.
In context
Detecting incentivised traffic relies on downstream behaviour, because the conversion itself looks normal. The signatures are a sharp drop-off immediately after the paid action (the reward is collected and the user leaves), near-zero second-action rates, deposits that are exactly the qualifying minimum followed by a withdrawal attempt, and traffic sourced from reward apps, offerwalls, "get paid to" sites and loyalty programmes.
Cohort analysis exposes it quickly: a source with a healthy registration rate but a day-7 retention near zero is almost always incentivised or worse.
For a legitimate affiliate, the risk is unknowingly buying incentivised traffic through a sub-source in a chain — a cheap install package, an "engagement" reseller — and having the conversions clawed back. The defences are the standard ones: demand SubID transparency into sub-sources, run new sources at a capped budget until a cohort matures, judge sources on cost per retained or depositing user rather than cost per registration, and cut anything whose users collect the conversion and never come back.
Worked example
An operator's cohort report for a new registration source shows a 9% click-to-registration rate — well above average — but day-7 retention of 0.4% and an average first deposit exactly at the $10 minimum, 80% of which is followed by a withdrawal request within an hour. The source is incentivised traffic from an offerwall; the operator rejects the conversions and the affiliate removes it.
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