iGaming Attribution: Who Gets Credit for the FTD

The terms behind it are in the glossary: attribution model, first-time deposit and postback URL.

The two words get used as one, and they answer different questions. Tracking is the record: this click happened, on this page, from this keyword, and this postback says the player behind it deposited. Attribution is the rule applied to the record: when one player has four recorded touches and one FTD, how much of the FTD each touch gets.

• Tracking recordsEvery click with its source, page, keyword and geo, and every reg, FTD and deposit postback matched to a click ID. Without it, there is nothing to attribute.
• Attribution dividesA model takes all the touches one player had before the FTD and splits the credit between them. Same record, different model, different winner.
• Tracking gaps become attribution errorsA touch that was never recorded cannot get credit, so its share goes to whatever was recorded. A streamer link that skips your domain hands its FTDs to the keyword the player clicked later.

So the order is fixed: record every touch first, on your own domain, then pick the model. A sophisticated model on a record with holes in it just distributes the holes more evenly.

Every partner program runs an attribution rule already, and it is written into the terms you accepted. Two operators' own terms, read on 2 October 2026, say it in almost the same words. Energy.Partners: "A customer will be linked to the last Affiliate who referred the customer to the Company based on the affiliate tracking cookie." Bons Partners calls it "Last Cookie Wins": your link has to be the last one the player used to register.

• Last click between affiliates. If the player clicked another affiliate's link after yours and registered from it, the player is theirs. Your earlier work is not split, it is gone.
• A period the terms state, or do not. How long the program remembers your click (the cookie or tracking period) is whatever your terms say. Neither of the two programs above states a number of days, so ask your AM rather than assuming a figure from a listicle.
• Rev share follows the player for life. Energy.Partners pays rev share "for the lifetime of its referred New Customers until termination of this agreement"; Bons Partners guarantees lifetime commission on rev share and the rev share part of hybrid deals. Once the player is yours, every month of their play is yours too.
• Negative months do not carry over at either of these two. Other programs do carry them, so read your own terms before you read a negative NGR month as a loss.

That rule answers the operator's question, which affiliate to pay. It says nothing about your question. Inside your own traffic, the same player may have touched a review page, a stream and a keyword, all of them yours, and the program sees one tracking link at registration. The click ID it returns on the postback is the one on the link the player registered through, which makes your raw postback data last click by construction.

One invented player, four touches, all yours, and one FTD on a €200 CPA deal. The days count back from the FTD.

1. Day 0, 13 days before the FTD: Google organic search, lands on your casino bonus review page.
2. Day 4, 9 days before: clicks the link under a Twitch stream you pay a flat fee for.
3. Day 9, 4 days before: taps a bonus code post in your Telegram channel.
4. Day 11, 2 days before: clicks your "casino bonus" exact match ad and registers. FTD on day 13.

• Last click

  Last click gives the keyword everything. It is what the postback says by itself, and it makes the bonus keyword look like the whole business.

• First click

  First click gives the review page everything. Right about where players are found, blind to what made them deposit.

• Linear

  Linear gives each touch €50. Fair to every touch, and therefore no help ranking them.

• Time decay

  Time decay halves a touch's weight every seven days back from the FTD. The keyword gets 37.6%, the review page 12.7%.

• Position based

  Position based gives 40% to the touch that found the player and 40% to the one that closed, and splits 20% between the middle.

• Data-driven

  Learns weights from your own converting and non-converting journeys. It needs volume, and it shows no fixed split you can check by hand.

Read the table by column, not by row. The review page earns between €0 and €200 for the same player depending on the rule, and the keyword between €0 and €200 the other way round. Nothing about the player changed. That is the whole case for choosing a model on purpose rather than inheriting last click from the postback. The attribution model entry has the general version of this comparison.

LeadJourney offers first click, last click, linear, position based and time decay, switchable per report on the same recorded journey, without re-processing anything. Data-driven is not among them.

The deal decides what you are paid for, and so what the model has to get right. There is no model that is correct; there is one that answers the question your deal asks.

CPA: count the FTDs, but do not starve the pages that find players

On a CPA deal every FTD is worth the same, so the question is how many FTDs each source produces and what each cost. Last click is the right view for the statement check, because it is the view the program shares: one FTD, one click ID. For budget it is the wrong one, because it gives the keyword the credit for players the review page and the stream found. Cut the review page on last click numbers and next quarter's bonus keyword clicks come from fewer people who already knew you.

Rev share: the player's value arrives after the FTD

On rev share the FTD is the start of the money, not the money. What you want to know is which sources bring players who keep playing, and that is a question about who found them. First click or position based keeps the acquiring touch in view; time decay is the weakest fit here, because it rewards whatever was nearest the FTD, which on most journeys is a bonus code or a keyword. Credit the later value back to the same split you used for the FTD, so a player's month six lands where their day one did.

Hybrid: one model, two values

A hybrid deal tempts you to run last click for the CPA part and first click for the rev share part. Do not: the two halves then credit different touches for the same player, and the sources stop adding up to the statement. Pick one model, apply it to the FTD count and to the value, and change it for both or for neither.

A model decides the share. You also have to decide what the share is of. Three candidates, each with its own catch.

• FTD countThe cleanest unit on a CPA deal: one FTD, split by the model. Pair it with reg to FTD per source, so a source with cheap regs and few deposits does not look like a winner.
• Deposit amountThe FTD amount and redeposits, when the program posts them. A good early signal of player value, but a deposit is not revenue: bonus play and withdrawals sit between the two.
• NGR posted backWhat a rev share deal actually pays on. It is the operator's calculation, gross revenue less bonuses, fees, taxes and the rest of their list, so it can only reach you on a postback or the statement.

NGR has one property the other two do not: it can be negative. Say the program posts €310 of NGR for our player in month one and -€120 in month two, because the player won (both figures invented). Under position based, the review page is credited €124 and then -€48. That is correct, and it is why a rev share report has to show months, not only totals. Whether a negative month carries over is your program's rule, not your model's.

When you send the FTD back to Google Ads or Meta, each platform runs its own attribution on it, over its own ads only, inside its own window. That attribution is for its bidding, not for your ledger, and the two will not match. Read from their own pages on 2 October 2026, and check again before you rely on a number; the sending itself is covered in server-side tracking for iGaming.

Two consequences for an affiliate. First, a Meta ad that was the first touch of a 13-day journey falls outside a 7-day click window, so Meta records nothing for an FTD your own first click report gives entirely to that ad. Second, Google's data-driven model only divides credit among Google ads; your review page, stream and Telegram channel do not exist for it. Set Google's click window to your real click to FTD time rather than the default, and keep the model question in your own tracker, where every source is in the same record. The attribution window entry explains the window in general.

None of this makes a gambling ad eligible. Google certifies gambling advertisers per country and Meta requires authorization in Business Suite; the details are in the policy section of the server-side tracking guide.

An operator has the opposite view. It sees every reg and deposit in its own backend, and its attribution problem is across channels it pays in different ways: paid UA on Google and Meta bought per click, affiliates paid per FTD or per share of NGR, and organic and brand traffic it pays nothing for directly.

• Affiliate last click is a payment rule, not a marketing model. A player who saw a paid social ad, then registered through an affiliate's link, is the affiliate's for commission. For the marketing budget, the paid ad still did something, and a multi-touch model across paid and affiliate touches is how that shows.
• Value is lifetime value. The operator has the full deposit and NGR history per player, so it can credit LTV rather than the FTD, and compare an affiliate's lifetime cost against paid UA's on the same footing.
• Data-driven needs volume, and operators have it. An operator with thousands of FTDs a month can feed a data-driven model; an affiliate with a few hundred across six brands usually cannot, which is one reason rule-based models remain the affiliate's tool.

LeadJourney's iGaming product is built for the affiliate's side of this, not as an operator's casino platform or partner program software. The operator's half lives in its own backend; the guide's operator section covers how it sends FTDs to the ad platforms.

1. Read your program's terms for the attribution rule, the tracking period and whether negative months carry over. If the period is not stated, ask your AM and write the answer down.
2. Record every touch on your own domain: SEO pages, streamer and Telegram links, paid clicks. A touch that skips your domain cannot get credit.
3. Pass your click ID on every tracking link and receive reg, FTD and deposit postbacks against it.
4. Choose one model per deal type before you look at the numbers, and keep last click beside it to reconcile with the statement.
5. Credit FTD count on CPA, deposits or posted NGR on rev share, and both with the same model on hybrid.
6. Report rev share by month, so a negative month is visible on the source that brought the player.
7. Set Google's click window to your real click to FTD time, and remember Meta's 7-day click limit when you compare its numbers with yours.
8. Review the model once a quarter against one question: did the budget it suggested produce more FTDs or more NGR than the one before?

• Server-side tracking for iGaming: the click ID, the postback, FTDs to Google and Meta, and the gambling ad policies.
• iGaming affiliate postbacks: what Income Access, MyAffiliates, Affilka, Cellxpert and NetRefer send, platform by platform.
• The best iGaming tracking software: the trackers that do the click and the postback, compared.
• In the glossary: attribution model, multi-touch attribution, first-time deposit, postback URL and click ID.
• On the product side: iGaming tracking software and tracking for affiliate marketers.