Tracking Links

Tracking Links

A tracking link is how a click becomes a record. In Offer Capsule every affiliate-offer pairing gets its own link, and the identifier inside it is encrypted rather than being a readable number. The affiliate copies it out of their portal and places it; when a visitor clicks, Offer Capsule decrypts the identifier, works out exactly which affiliate is sending traffic to which offer, screens the click, logs it, and forwards the visitor to the advertiser. Nothing is assembled by hand and nothing useful is exposed in the URL.

What the link looks like

The link points at the Offer Capsule click tracker and carries one required parameter: an encrypted token standing in for the affiliate-offer pairing. Because it is encrypted, an affiliate cannot read another affiliate's id out of their own link, cannot increment it to find someone else's, and cannot hand-edit it into a pairing they are not approved for. A link whose token fails to decrypt is not silently ignored - it is recorded as a decrypt failure, so a tampered or corrupted link leaves a trail rather than vanishing.

The creative parameter

An optional creative parameter, appended as cid, names the specific creative that was placed. Affiliates never have to add it themselves: the portal builds a per-creative link for every asset on the offer, with the parameter already in place. When it is present, the click attributes to that creative as well as to the affiliate, which is what makes creative-level reporting possible - see creatives. It also lets the tracker recognise email placements and screen them appropriately.

Sub Id parameters

Affiliates append their own segment parameters to the link, s1 through s5 by default plus any custom segments the offer defines, and those values are captured against the click. This is the affiliate's own bookkeeping - placement, ad set, list, keyword - and Offer Capsule stores it, reports on it, and hands it back to them in postbacks. See sub id tracking.

What happens on a click

The click request is not just a redirect. In one pass, Offer Capsule:

• decrypts the affiliate-offer token and loads the pairing;
• checks the state of everything involved - offer active, advertiser active, affiliate active, the pairing itself active and approved, the offer started and not ended;
• resolves the visitor's country and applies the offer's geo targets;
• evaluates the offer-wide and per-affiliate conversion caps, and prepay balance where the offer bills that way;
• runs the fraud checks - bot user-agent, signature, referer, velocity, fingerprint and IP fan-out, behavioural signals;
• captures the sub id segment values present on the query string;
• records the click with its IP address, user agent, fingerprint, and an explicit status.

Every one of those gates maps to a specific reason code, so a blocked click is never just missing from your numbers. It is present, with the reason attached, which is what lets reports group blocked traffic by cause rather than leaving you to guess.

The attribution window

A click sets a tracking cookie whose lifetime is the offer's click retention setting, and the same window governs how far back the tracker will look for a prior click when a conversion arrives. Offers that do not set it use a thirty day window.

One link, many jobs

The same click pipeline serves every offer type, so a CPC offer records its conversion on the click itself while a CPA offer records only the click and waits for the pixel. It is also where SmartLinks hand off once they have picked an offer, which means a SmartLink click gets exactly the same screening and logging as a direct one.

Next: conversion tracking for the other half of the round trip, and reporting for what the click data turns into.