Offer wide and per affiliate conversion caps enforced at click time, with capped clicks redirected to a trafficback URL.
An advertiser will take two hundred conversions this month and not one more. An affiliate is allowed fifty of them. Caps are how you enforce that without watching a dashboard, and trafficback is what you do with the visitor who arrives after the cap is full. Offer Capsule evaluates both caps on every click, before the visitor is handed to the advertiser, and redirects capped clicks to a fallback URL instead of dropping them. Nobody delivers volume they cannot bill for, and nobody wastes a real visitor.
The offer conversion cap is the ceiling for the offer as a whole, across every affiliate running it. That is the advertiser's protection: their budget commitment, expressed as a number the system will not exceed.
The affiliate cap is a separate ceiling on a single affiliate-offer pairing. That is your protection and the other affiliates'. It stops one affiliate consuming an entire offer's allocation in an afternoon, which is what lets you distribute a limited offer across a roster fairly, and it is also the natural throttle for a new affiliate you are still evaluating.
Both are evaluated on every click. The offer cap counts conversions across the offer; the affiliate cap counts conversions on that one pairing. Each cap runs against its own period, so capacity refreshes on schedule rather than being consumed once and gone forever.
The check happens on the way in. This is the important design decision. Checking at conversion time means the visitor already reached the advertiser, the advertiser already got the action, and you now have a conversion you have to refuse to pay for. Checking at click time means the traffic never arrives in the first place, so there is no conversion to argue about and no affiliate who believes they earned something they did not. It is the same reasoning behind enforcing geo targeting on the click.
A capped click is logged with its own explicit reason, distinct from a fraud block, a geo block, or an inactive offer. When an affiliate asks why their traffic stopped converting, the answer is in the record: not blocked as suspicious, blocked because the offer was full.
The visitor who clicks a capped offer is not a bot. They are a real person who did what your affiliate asked. Offer Capsule distinguishes a cap block from every other kind of block, and when the reason is a cap and the offer has a trafficback URL configured, the visitor is redirected there rather than dropped on an error page. Send them to another offer, a comparison page, a house offer, whatever monetises. If no trafficback URL is configured, behaviour is unchanged and the click follows the normal error path, so adding one is purely additive.
The same idea drives SmartLinks, where remaining cap capacity is one of the filters used to pick an offer in the first place - a SmartLink simply will not resolve to an offer that has nothing left, and falls back to its own trafficback URL when nothing qualifies.
Advertisers can be told when their offer fills. The notice is emailed once per cap period, so an advertiser on a daily cap gets one message a day rather than one per blocked click. It is off by default and opted into per advertiser, because not every advertiser wants it. The notices are produced by a background sweep and never run on the click path, so an email problem cannot slow a click down.
Related: offer setup for where caps and the trafficback URL are configured, reporting for seeing how much traffic is hitting the ceiling, and billing and payouts for what happens to the conversions that do get through.
See Offer Capsule running against your own offers. We will follow up to arrange a walkthrough.