Registration to FTD conversion is the intent test of affiliate traffic: of everyone who bothered to create an account, how many trusted the brand with money? It is the cleanest pre-deposit quality signal you have, and it is routinely ignored because it sits between two numbers everyone does track.
Practitioner consensus puts a healthy reg-to-FTD rate at roughly 20-30%. High-intent sources such as SEO comparison traffic, where the visitor already read a review and chose a casino before clicking, can convert at 50-80%. Broad media buying, streams and incentivized placements often land at 10-15%, and that can still be fine if the CPA prices it in.
Below about 15%, the traffic registered without intending to play. Common causes: misleading creatives promising bonuses the operator does not offer, audiences collected for something other than gambling, or registration-incentivized campaigns. A low rate multiplies your costs invisibly: KYC checks, verification workload and bonus exposure all scale with registrations, not deposits. The commercial fix is source transparency plus a qualified CPA, so a registration without a real deposit never triggers payment.
Counterintuitively, a very high reg-to-FTD rate combined with very fast registration-to-deposit times deserves a fraud check rather than a bonus. Pre-farmed accounts, multi-accounting rings and self-referral fraud all convert beautifully, because the "player" was never a person deciding. Check duplicate rates, device clustering and deposit-amount uniformity before celebrating. Fraud reports consistently rank bonus abuse as the biggest fraud category in iGaming, and it enters through exactly this pattern.
Reg-to-FTD only makes sense between its neighbours. Click-to-registration tells you whether the pre-click promise matches the landing page; unusually high click-to-reg with low reg-to-FTD suggests incentivized or bot registrations. Downstream, the 2nd deposit rate tells you whether the FTDs that did convert were worth having. A source can pass one gate and fail the next; the leak is wherever the drop is steepest.
The free calculator weighs reg-to-FTD alongside retention, NGR, bonus economics and risk penalties, and tells you whether to scale, keep, renegotiate or investigate the partner, including whether a CPA or revshare structure fits that quality level.
Score an affiliate free →Related: Affiliate quality KPIs · CPA vs revenue share · Methodology