How It Works

The life of an offer in Offer Capsule: create it, affiliates run it, clicks are screened, conversions clear their hold window, postbacks fire, reports settle.

How Offer Capsule Works

This is the life of an offer in Offer Capsule, from setup to settled payout. Every step below runs inside the Lead Capsule platform - same portals, same billing, same audit trail.

1. Create the offer

Set the offer type (CPL, CPA, CPC, RevShare, or CPM), the payout price or percentage, start and end dates, caps, and the hold window that pending conversions must wait out. Attach creatives - email, banner, text link, pop-up, pop-under, or video. A PDF integration spec is generated automatically and kept current on every save. If the offer already lives on an external network, import it instead: connect with your own API credentials and sync it in, creatives and categories included.

2. Affiliates pick it up

Affiliates browse your public offers in their portal and run the ones they are approved for. Each affiliate-offer pairing gets its own encrypted tracking link, and each creative carries a link of its own so clicks attribute to what was actually placed. A SmartLink goes one step further: one link that resolves the best-matching active offer for each visitor by geography, category, and remaining caps.

3. Clicks are tracked and screened

Every click is logged with its sub ids - the standard s1 through s5 parameters plus any named segments you define on the offer. Before the visitor is passed through, the click runs the fraud gates: bot user-agent and referer checks, velocity and fan-out limits, signature and nonce validation, and a geo check against the offer's target countries. Blocked clicks are logged with an explicit reason, and a visitor blocked only by a cap is redirected to your trafficback URL instead of being dropped.

4. Conversions fire

Conversions arrive however the advertiser can send them: a server-to-server post carrying the trackback token, the generated JavaScript pixel with its image fallback, a lead post for CPL offers, or automatically on the click for CPC offers. A coupon code can credit a conversion to an affiliate when there was no click at all. Each conversion is recorded as Pending with its payout and revenue frozen at that moment - the tracking request itself never moves money.

5. The lifecycle runs

A background sweep approves each pending conversion once its hold window elapses; offers with no hold settle within minutes. From the review queues you can approve early, reject with a reason, or reverse an approved conversion for a chargeback or scrub - reversing voids both the revenue and payout legs. Test conversions are recorded but never billed and never reported.

6. Affiliates hear about it

At each lifecycle event - recorded, approved, reversed - the affiliate's server-to-server postbacks fire with click id, payout, status, order details, and every captured sub id substituted into their URL. Delivery is queued with retries and backoff, so a slow endpoint never loses a notification.

7. Money and reports settle

Approval creates the revenue and payout transaction legs and draws down prepay balances where the offer bills that way; CPM offers bill each completed thousand-impression block exactly once. Everything lands in the drill-down reports: clicks and uniques, conversions by status, revenue, payout, margin, CR% and EPC, sub id breakdowns, and period-over-period comparisons - in your admin, in each portal scoped to its own party, and over the JSON API.

Ready for the details? See the full feature list, or what this looks like for affiliates and for networks.