Resolve the visitor country at click time and block traffic outside an offer target set, logged with an explicit reason.
Most offers are not valid everywhere. An advertiser licensed in three countries does not want traffic from the other hundred and ninety, and an affiliate who sends it will not get paid for it either. Geo targeting in Offer Capsule resolves the visitor's country on every single click and checks it against the offer's target set before the visitor is passed through. Traffic that does not qualify is stopped at the click, logged with a specific reason, and never becomes a conversion anyone has to argue about later.
The check happens inside the click request itself. Offer Capsule resolves the visitor's country from their IP address using GeoIP and compares it against the countries the offer targets. If the offer does not accept that country, the click is blocked before the redirect. This is deliberately not a reporting-time filter. Filtering afterwards means the advertiser already received the visitor, the affiliate already believes they earned something, and you are now reconciling backwards. Blocking at the click means the disagreement never happens.
A geo-blocked click is not discarded. It is written with the status GEO_BLOCKED and a note recording the country that was resolved and the fact that it was not in the offer's target set. That gives you three things at once: the affiliate can see that their traffic arrived and why it was refused, you can see how much of an affiliate's volume is out of geo before you have a conversation about it, and the advertiser can see that their targeting is being enforced. Reports group blocked clicks by reason, so out-of-geo traffic is a number you can look at rather than an absence you have to infer. See reporting.
Country resolution is best-effort by design. If the GeoIP source is not provisioned, or a lookup fails, or the address simply cannot be resolved, the country comes back unknown and the click passes. Enforcement stays dormant rather than turning into a wall. This is the same principle applied everywhere in the tracker: an auxiliary lookup is never allowed to cost you real traffic. The consequence is worth being explicit about - geo blocking is an enforcement layer that engages when it can resolve an answer, not a guarantee that no unresolvable traffic ever gets through.
Geo is evaluated alongside the other offer-state gates, before caps and before the fraud checks. The order is deliberate: there is no point spending a velocity or fan-out check on a click that was never eligible for the offer in the first place. Each gate maps to its own status, so a click blocked on geo is distinguishable from one blocked on a cap, an inactive offer, an expired date range, or a fraud signal. See tracking links for the full sequence.
Geo targeting is also one of the three filters a SmartLink applies when it picks an offer at click time. Rather than blocking a visitor whose country an offer will not take, a SmartLink simply does not consider that offer a candidate and resolves to one that does accept them. Same country data, different use: enforcement on a direct link, routing on a SmartLink. See SmartLinks.
Set the target countries on the offer along with its other terms. Because the check runs per click and reads the offer's current targets, narrowing or widening the set takes effect immediately on the next click - there is nothing to redeploy and no affiliate link to reissue. Offer changes are audit-logged, so a change to a target set is attributable.
Related: offer setup, caps and trafficback for the other click-time gate that stops traffic, and fraud protection for the checks that run after it.
See Offer Capsule running against your own offers. We will follow up to arrange a walkthrough.