iGaming Marketing: How Affiliates Fit Into An Online Casino's Marketing Strategy

Marketing an online casino or a sportsbook is not as simple as marketing any other product. In most industries, the marketing team decides which channels to invest in, how much to spend on each of them, and when to switch them on or off. But in the iGaming industry, a major part of these decisions is taken by people who are not even a part of the operator's business, such as regulators, advertising platforms, sports leagues, search engines, and the players themselves.

A brand may plan a launch with paid search ads, a TV campaign, a club sponsorship, CRM, SEO, and affiliates, only to find out that half of these channels come with restrictions it has no control over. For example, the ads on Google cannot go live without Google's own certification, some regulators only allow casino ads during certain hours of the day, and in the Premier League, betting brands can no longer feature on the front of the players' shirts.

At MAP, we work with more than 300 iGaming brands on the affiliate side of their marketing, and one of the most common questions we receive from operators is how big their affiliate channel should be when compared to the rest of their marketing. This article will help you understand how each marketing channel works in iGaming, who else has control over it, and where affiliates fit in the overall mix.

Simply put, iGaming marketing refers to the strategies that online casinos, sportsbooks, poker rooms, and bingo websites use to bring in new players and keep the existing ones engaged. Like in most industries, it involves a variety of channels, each with its own purpose. Some of the most common channels involved in iGaming marketing are:

• Paid search and paid social: Ads on Google and social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, where the operator pays for every click or impression.
• TV, radio, and print: Traditional advertising that helps build the brand among a wide audience.
• Sponsorships: Deals with football clubs, leagues, and sports events, such as shirt sponsorships and pitchside boards.
• CRM: Emails, text messages, push notifications, and on-site offers that are sent to the existing players.
• SEO: Organic search traffic that comes to the operator's own website.
• Affiliates: Independent websites and partners who promote the operator's brand and get paid a commission for the players they send.

What makes iGaming marketing different from marketing in most other industries is the amount of control the operator has over these channels. Almost every channel listed above has someone outside the business who has the power to restrict it or turn it off completely. Let's go through each of these channels in brief detail.

Most marketers choose paid search as their first channel, for it is quick to switch on and easy to measure. In iGaming, it also comes with the longest waiting time. Google only allows gambling ads from operators that hold a licence in the country they want to target and have received Google's own certification for that country. This means that the operators must submit a separate application for every country, and in the United States, for every state. Until the certification is approved, the ads will not run, no matter how big the budget is.

Meta follows a similar approach. Operators must get prior written permission from Meta before running gambling ads on Facebook and Instagram, along with evidence of their licence for every territory they want to target. The ads cannot be targeted at anyone under the age of 18, and the local rules in many markets go even further than that.

Once the ads are running, paid search works the same way it does in most industries. You pay for every click, whether the player makes a deposit or not, and you can increase or decrease the budget as per your requirements. However, it is important to note that the keywords that bring in the most players, such as 'online casino UK' or 'betting sites', have a huge competition, as all the licensed operators in that market place their bids on them. A good number of affiliates too bid on the same keywords to send players to the same operators, which pushes the cost of every click higher. Additionally, Google has updated its gambling ads policy several times over the past couple of years for individual US states, which shows that the rules can change at any time.

The same marketing channel can be allowed in one market and banned in the next. Hence, an iGaming marketing plan only makes sense when it is planned one market at a time. Brief descriptions of the rules in some of the major markets are given below:

• Italy: Gambling ads have been banned in Italy in almost all forms ever since the Dignity Decree came into force in 2018, and sponsorships too were banned from 2019. Operators in Italy are still debating in 2026 whether affiliate marketing falls under this ban as well.
• Germany: The 2021 State Treaty on Gambling does not allow online casino, virtual slot, and online poker ads to be shown on TV, radio, or the internet from 6 am to 9 pm.
• Netherlands: The Netherlands had banned untargeted gambling advertising in July 2023, which covered TV, radio, print, and public spaces. Sports sponsorships, which were allowed for a little longer, came to an end in July 2025.
• Ontario: Ontario had banned athletes from appearing in iGaming ads in February 2024, except for the ads that promote responsible gambling.
• UK: Since October 2022, the UK advertising codes have banned gambling ads that have a strong appeal to under-18s, which removed most top footballers and many influencers from gambling ads.

These rules don't only apply to the ads made by the operators themselves. They apply to the brand, wherever it appears. A German review website showing a slot banner during the day is likely to be a problem for the operator whose brand appears on it. Similarly, in the UK, the Gambling Commission makes the licensed operators accountable for the actions of the third parties they have a contract with, including their affiliates. So, while many people believe that affiliates are a way to get around the advertising rules, the regulators clearly see it differently.

Shirt sponsorships and pitchside boards are what most people notice first when it comes to gambling ads, but tracking the players they bring in is very difficult. They help in building the brand, but there is no tracking link that can connect a shirt sponsorship to a player's registration. Moreover, these channels are controlled by the sports leagues and clubs as much as the regulators.

In April 2023, the Premier League clubs had agreed to remove gambling sponsors from the front of their matchday shirts. The current 2026/27 season, which kicked off this August, is the first one without them. Gambling brands can still appear on the shirt sleeves and pitchside boards, and several clubs have moved their betting partners to the sleeve. On UK TV, the industry's own code has kept betting ads away from live sports before the 9 pm watershed since 2019, from five minutes before the match begins until five minutes after the final whistle.

The good news is that these changes are usually announced a couple of seasons in advance, giving the operators enough time to plan. If you do want to measure how many players a sponsorship brings in, promo codes and QR codes are some of the only ways to do it, and even these only track the players who actually use them.

Operators use CRM to communicate with the players they already have, through emails, text messages, push notifications, and offers shown on the website when the player logs in. It is also the channel that the player can turn off with a single tap by unsubscribing. Naturally, the players who choose to keep receiving the messages are usually more valuable, which is why CRM reports often look better than the real picture.

Regulations play a major role in CRM as well. Players who have self-excluded cannot be sent any marketing material, either by the operator or by anyone promoting the brand for them. Additionally, from 19 January 2026, wagering requirements on bonuses in Great Britain cannot go above 10 times, which means many retention offers that worked well in the past had to be rewritten.

CRM is especially important when it comes to affiliate marketing, for it decides how much a player is worth after their first month. If the affiliate is on a revenue share deal, their commission is based on this very value. For example, two operators may offer the same 30% revenue share, but the amount they pay for each player can differ a lot, if one operator is able to retain its players for a whole year, while the other loses them within a few months. You can learn more about this in our article on FTD value against lifetime value.

The operator's own website usually ranks for its brand name, its game pages, and a few other related terms, if enough work has been put into it. SEO is cost-effective once the website starts ranking, and it keeps bringing in players without any extra spending. But there is a catch. Even if you follow all the right practices, a single Google core update can reshuffle the search results and take away a big part of your traffic in just a few days.

Generic keywords with the most value, such as best online casino and new betting sites, are mostly held by affiliates and comparison websites. These websites have been building pages around these keywords for many years, which makes it difficult for the operators to outrank them.

Unlike the other channels, affiliates are not just one channel. They are made up of hundreds of separate businesses, each with its own audience and its own way of bringing in players. Some of the most common types of affiliates in iGaming are:

• Review and comparison websites: Websites that review casinos and sportsbooks and compare their offers.
• Tipsters and betting communities: Groups on platforms such as Telegram and Discord, where members share tips and betting ideas.
• Streamers: Content creators who play casino games or place bets live on streaming platforms.
• Media buyers: Affiliates who buy paid traffic with their own money and send it to the operator.
• Email list owners: Partners who promote the operator's offers to their own subscribers.
• Sub-affiliate networks: Master affiliates who bring in other affiliates and earn a share of their commission.

Any one of these affiliates can stop promoting your brand at any time and move their traffic to a competitor. But no one can switch off all of them at the same time, and this is what makes affiliates a unique channel in iGaming marketing.

Industry figures reveal that 30% to 70% of the new players of online casinos are brought in by affiliates. Our article on iGaming affiliate marketing statistics had put this number at 40% to 70%. The range is wide, for it depends a lot on the market and how long the brand has been around. Reasonably, a brand that has just launched in a market with daytime TV ad bans and no Google certification yet will have to rely on affiliates for the majority of its first year. Whereas an older, well-known brand gets more of its players from people searching for it by name.

Another reason why affiliates are popular among operators is the way they are paid. Paid search charges for every click, and TV charges for the airtime, whether anyone makes a deposit or not. On the other hand, an affiliate on a CPA deal gets paid only when the player qualifies, and an affiliate on revenue share gets paid from the money the player loses. To put it simply, the cost comes after the player arrives, and not before. To know which commission model works best for which type of partner, go through our article on CPA vs revenue share vs hybrid models.

There is one thing the operator gives up in return, and that is control over the content. The reviews, banners, streams, and posts that the affiliates create are not written by the operator, but they all carry the operator's brand, and the regulators treat them as the operator's own marketing.

This is a part of iGaming marketing that most operators miss. Most of the traffic that casino affiliates send comes from Google search, where review and comparison websites rank for the generic keywords that the operator's website usually cannot rank for. This means that when Google rolls out a core update, it can affect the operator's own rankings and the rankings of its biggest SEO affiliates in the same week.

So, a marketing mix that seems to have five separate channels may actually have two or three of them depending on the same company. The operator's SEO and its SEO affiliates depend on Google's rankings, and its paid search and media-buying affiliates depend on Google's ad policies.

Hence, the share of players coming from each type of affiliate is a more useful number than the total share coming from affiliates. For example, consider two operators who get half of their new players from affiliates. The first gets them from 20 SEO websites, while the second gets them from a mix of review websites, streamers, tipster groups, and media buyers. Both may look the same on the report, but the first one is at a much higher risk.

The table given below charts out each marketing channel, who else has control over it, and what the operator pays for:

As you can see, Google appears in four of the rows, and the regulator appears in almost all of them. The only channels where you pay nothing until a player arrives are the affiliate channels.

In most regulated markets, affiliates become the biggest source of new players for the operators, and the other channels are planned around them. This is not always a deliberate decision, but happens naturally, since every other channel is controlled by someone else and affiliates are the only channel where the cost follows the player. Paid search, in the markets where it is allowed, supports the affiliates and can be scaled up or down depending on the number of players you need at that time. Sponsorships and TV help build the brand name, which in turn helps every other channel perform better. CRM decides how much each player is worth once they arrive, and SEO brings in the players who search for the brand by name.

Some markets, such as Italy, restrict almost every channel at the same time. In such markets, the operator's own website, its games, and its CRM carry most of the weight. In the United States, the rules change from state to state, with New Jersey having a different set of rules than Pennsylvania or Michigan. You can read more about this in our piece on the US market.

Within the affiliate channel, having a good mix of different types of partners is just as important as the overall size. A program with a long list of small partners along with a few big ones is more likely to stay stable during a core update than one that depends on just three comparison websites. It takes more effort to find partners other than SEO websites, and our guide on how to find the right affiliates will help you with it. Some programs also bring in master affiliates and sub-affiliates, which adds more variety to the mix, but has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Are you tired of seeing your entire affiliate channel as one big number on your reports? Don't worry, MAP is built to show you exactly where your affiliate players are coming from. On MAP, affiliates can create unlimited site profiles for each website they own and run multiple campaigns at the same time. Dynamic tracking parameters, such as click IDs, allow them to track each placement separately.

For traffic that cannot carry a link, such as streams, podcasts, and shirt sleeves, MAP offers promo codes and QR codes that come built in. Offline affiliate and agent campaigns too can be tracked with MAP's offline tracking tools. This means that when you want to know how many players came from SEO websites and how many came from streamers, the answer is right there in your data.

But that's not all. MAP allows you to create separate commission plans for each partner, with options such as CPA, CPL, hybrid, and both tiered and flat revenue share. This means a media buyer and a content website don't have to be on the same deal. Creatives and landing page URLs are managed through MAP's built-in ad server, which allows you to update an offer without every partner having to change their links. The built-in inbox and bulk messaging feature helps you inform all your partners when the rules in a market change. MAP also comes with a REST API that partners and networks can use to pull their data into their own BI tools, and the same API is a way of bringing your affiliate numbers into the same report as your paid search and CRM numbers. For more details on tracking, take a look at our operator's guide to affiliate tracking software.

It is important to note that MAP tracks the affiliate channel only. It doesn't run your paid search, CRM, or sponsorships, and it doesn't have any data on how those channels performed. If you want to compare all your channels, you will have to do it in your own reports by adding the affiliate data from MAP to the data from your other channels. MAP also doesn't decide what your marketing mix should be. That depends on the markets you hold licences in, how much you can spend before a player brings any money back, and how long you are willing to wait for SEO to show results.

MAP doesn't make your partners' content compliant either. What it does is show you the partner and the placement that each player came from, and this information comes in handy when a regulator asks about the source of an ad. Checking whether the ad should have been published in the first place is still the operator's responsibility. And no affiliate platform can stop a Google core update from affecting your partners' rankings. But MAP can show you what percentage of your affiliate players come from SEO websites, so that you are aware of the risk before the update rolls out.

You don't need any special tools to understand how much of your marketing depends on a single company. All you need is the data from the last quarter. Here's a simple step-by-step breakdown of the process:

1. 1Take the list of first depositors from the last quarter in one market.
2. 2Add the source next to each player, such as affiliate, paid search, paid social, organic, direct, or CRM.
3. 3Divide the affiliate players based on the type of partner, such as SEO websites, streamers, tipster groups, and media buyers.
4. 4Next to each source, write down who else has control over it, such as Google's rankings, Google's ad policy, Meta, the regulator, or the player.
5. 5Count the number of players that depend on each of these.

That's it!

In most cases, operators are surprised to see a single company behind a large part of their players. And more often than not, that company is Google, since it has control over their own SEO and paid search, as well as the SEO affiliates and the affiliates who buy search ads. This percentage can be added to the list of KPIs that every iGaming affiliate manager should track, and should be checked again once the next core update is rolled out.

If you are finding it difficult to divide your affiliate players by the type of partner, the issue lies with your tracking and not your marketing. So, what are you waiting for? Book a demo with MAP and see how your affiliate channel can be tracked from start to end. You can also check out the features page to learn about everything MAP offers. Are you planning to start an affiliate program from scratch? Our step-by-step guide on setting up a casino affiliate program will walk you through it.

What is iGaming marketing?

iGaming marketing refers to the strategies that online casinos, sportsbooks, poker rooms, and bingo websites use to bring in new players and keep the existing ones engaged. Some of the popular channels involved are paid search, sponsorships, CRM, SEO, and affiliates.

What are the best marketing channels for online casinos?

The answer depends on the market the casino operates in. In markets that allow paid search and TV ads, new brands can make use of them to attract players quickly. In markets where they are restricted, affiliates and SEO play a bigger role. Most operators end up getting the majority of their new players through affiliates.

How many casino players come through affiliates?

According to industry figures, affiliates bring in anywhere from 30% to 70% of the new players at online casinos. The exact number changes from one market to another and also depends on how old the brand is.

Are online casinos allowed to run ads on Google and Facebook?

Yes, but only in the markets that allow gambling ads. Google needs operators to hold a local licence and get Google's certification for every country, and Meta needs the operator to get written permission first.

Is the operator responsible for the content its affiliates publish?

Yes. The regulators in most markets, including the UK Gambling Commission, hold the operator responsible for the marketing done by its affiliates. This is why most operators keep a close eye on the content their partners publish.

Does MAP track marketing channels other than affiliates?

No, MAP only tracks the affiliate channel. To compare it with your paid search, CRM, or other channels, you will have to add the affiliate data from MAP to your own reports.