Capture s1 through s5 or your own named segments on every click, report on them, and echo them back through postback macros.
Sub Ids are the affiliate's own labels for their traffic. An affiliate running one offer across four placements, six ad sets, and a dozen keywords needs to know which of those actually converted, and the only party who knows what those labels mean is the affiliate. Offer Capsule captures the values they append to their tracking links, stores them against the click, reports on them, and hands them back in postbacks. The network gets a breakdown it can act on, and the affiliate gets their own taxonomy back untouched.
Every offer starts with five segments named Sub 1 through Sub 5, mapped to the query parameters s1 through s5. That mapping is deliberate: s1 through s5 is what external trackers emit, and those trackers expect to get the same values echoed back to them as sub1 through sub5. An affiliate arriving from another network can point their existing setup at an Offer Capsule link and it works, with no relabelling on either side.
The five defaults are a starting point, not a limit. Segments are per-offer definitions with a name and a source parameter, both of which you choose, so an offer can capture anything the query string carries under whatever label makes sense to you. A segment can be deactivated without deleting the values already captured under it, and each carries a rank that doubles as its positional alias.
When a click arrives, Offer Capsule reads the offer's active segment definitions and records a value for every one whose source parameter is present on the request. Parameters that are not there are simply not recorded; there are no empty placeholder rows to filter out later. Capture is best-effort by design: if anything goes wrong reading segment values, the click still tracks and the visitor still reaches the advertiser. A reporting nicety is never allowed to cost you a click.
The sub id report breaks traffic down by captured segment value rather than by offer or affiliate, and it carries the metrics that matter for a placement decision: clicks, conversions, conversion rate, EPC, revenue, and payout. That is what turns a list of opaque labels into a decision - this ad set is at a third the EPC of that one, stop buying it. Affiliates get the same breakdown in their own portal, scoped to their own traffic and showing their payout rather than network revenue. See reporting.
When a conversion fires an affiliate's postback, every segment captured on the originating click is available as a macro, addressable two ways. Positionally, {sub1} through {subN} resolve by segment rank, which is what an affiliate migrating from another platform will already have in their URL template. By name, {segment:AdSet} resolves the segment called AdSet, which is clearer to read and does not break when ranks are reordered. Values are URL-encoded on substitution, and a macro that does not resolve collapses to empty rather than being forwarded as a literal brace. See affiliate postbacks.
Storing sub ids as named definitions with per-click values, rather than as five fixed columns on the click row, is what makes both the custom naming and the by-name macros possible. It also means adding a sixth or a tenth segment to an offer is configuration rather than a schema change, and that the sub id report can group by any of them without special cases.
Related: tracking links for where the parameters are appended, creatives for attribution one level up, and the affiliate portal for how affiliates see their own breakdown.
See Offer Capsule running against your own offers. We will follow up to arrange a walkthrough.