Payout terms, dates, visibility, categories, hold windows, offer cloning and an auto-generated advertiser integration spec.
An offer is the contract between an advertiser and your affiliates, expressed as settings. Offer setup in Offer Capsule is one form covering the commercial terms, the visibility rules, the timing, and the lifecycle behaviour of every conversion the offer will produce. Get those right once and the tracker, the billing legs, the reports, and the advertiser-facing documentation all follow from them.
Every offer carries an advertiser, an offer type, and a payout. Flat-price offers use a payout price; revenue-share offers use a payout percentage instead. Each offer has its own currency code, which is what the portals format amounts in, so a network running offers in more than one currency does not have to normalise anything by hand. Offers also sit under one or more categories, which is what affiliates browse by and what SmartLinks match against when they resolve an offer at click time.
An offer is either public - visible in the affiliate portal's offer browse to affiliates who are not yet running it - or private, which keeps it off that list so you can assign it deliberately. An active flag switches the whole offer on or off without deleting it, and start and end dates bound the window in which clicks are accepted; a click that arrives before the start date or after the end date is logged with that exact reason rather than silently passed through. Offers can also be flagged as adult content, so affiliates know what they are picking up before they run it.
Click retention sets how far back the tracker looks when it ties an incoming conversion to an earlier click from the same visitor, and it is also how long the tracking cookie lives. Set it long for considered purchases, short for impulse offers. Offers that never set it fall back to a thirty day window.
Three settings decide what happens after a conversion lands. The hold window is the number of days a conversion sits Pending before it is eligible to fund, which is your window to scrub. Auto-approve decides whether held conversions are approved automatically once that window elapses or whether they wait for a human. Allow multiple conversions per click decides whether a single click can produce more than one billable conversion; leave it off and a repeat conversion on the same click is blocked as a duplicate. All three are per-offer, so a high-trust advertiser can settle immediately while a new one seasons. The full state machine is on the conversion lifecycle.
An offer is not finished until affiliates have something to place. Attach creatives for each placement type, define the sub id segments you want captured on every click, and set the conversion caps and trafficback URL that protect the advertiser's budget. Geo targeting is set on the offer too, and is enforced on every click - see geo targeting.
Most offers in a network are variations on each other. Copying an existing offer gives you a new offer with the same settings already filled in, which is faster than retyping a form and far harder to get subtly wrong than starting from scratch.
Every time an offer is saved, Offer Capsule regenerates a PDF integration specification for it. That is the document you hand the advertiser: it describes the offer and how to integrate against it, and because it is regenerated on save it cannot drift away from what the offer actually does. You can also regenerate it on demand from the offers list, which is useful when an advertiser has misplaced theirs.
Offer changes, and changes to the creatives, segments, coupons, and network connections attached to them, are written to the platform audit log. When a payout dispute turns on what an offer said last Tuesday, that is a lookup rather than an argument.
From here, see the five pricing models on offer types, pull existing offers in from another network on offer import, or look at the links your affiliates get on tracking links.
See Offer Capsule running against your own offers. We will follow up to arrange a walkthrough.