Resources
The field guide to running a program.
Plain-language guides to affiliate tracking and attribution: how a click becomes attributed revenue, what every number in your reports means, and the groundwork that keeps your data from quietly disappearing.
Written by the team building the platform. No fluff, no gated PDFs.
Foundations
Start here. The vocabulary and the object model every affiliate program is built on.
Adding and managing affiliates: the partner record and the pending queue
What an affiliate record holds, how to review pending signups with accept or decline, why account managers matter, and how sub-IDs and the performance grid turn the affiliate list into your most-used report.
Advertisers and the event catalog: the record every offer hangs off
What an advertiser is in an affiliate program, why every offer belongs to exactly one, and how the advertiser's event catalog decides what counts as a conversion, what gets paid, and what your affiliates ever see.
Affiliate statements: how partners see what they're owed and what they were paid
What a partner statement is, why self-billing means the program writes the invoice, how to read the lines and adjustments, what a carried-forward balance means under a payment threshold, and why statements that agree with reports are the foundation of partner trust.
Contracts and payouts: how the money works in an affiliate program
A guide to where an affiliate program's money lives — what a contract defines, payout versus received and your margin, flat formats versus RevShare, the override precedence that decides which number applies, and why economics freeze at click time.
Getting started with affiliate tracking: from empty account to first conversion
A walkthrough of standing up an affiliate program from scratch — the tracking domain that must come first, the advertiser-offer-affiliate-campaign chain, generating a tracking link, installing the conversion pixel, and seeing your first attributed report.
Global search and the command palette: finding any record in one keystroke
Why a command palette is the quiet productivity multiplier of an affiliate platform — jumping to any page, pulling up an offer or partner by name or ID, and resolving a support call by looking up a conversion or click by its identifier, all without leaving the keyboard.
How affiliates get paid: from click to credited conversion
A plain-language guide for affiliates on how earnings work — how a click becomes a credited conversion, why your payout is locked in at click time to protect you, what each conversion status means, and why a conversion sometimes goes uncredited.
Landing pages and link destinations: where a click actually lands
How landing pages belong to offers, how a campaign can point one affiliate at a different page, why the destination is resolved at click time, and how a returning, already-converted visitor can be sent to a thank-you page instead.
The 10 Best Affiliate Tracking Platforms in 2026 (Honest Comparison)
A genuinely honest ranking of the ten best affiliate tracking and attribution platforms in 2026 — CAKE, Everflow, TUNE, Affise, Impact, Trackier, Scaleo, Trackdesk, Post Affiliate Pro and LimeliJourney — with web-verified pricing, a feature matrix, and a real "best for" verdict for each.
The activity log: who changed what in your affiliate program, and when
Why an affiliate platform needs a real audit trail, what a good activity log records, and how a single searchable feed of every edit, export, sign-in, and AI action turns "who did this?" from an investigation into a lookup.
The affiliate portal experience: what self-service gives your partners
A tour of a modern affiliate portal from the partner's side — finding offers, grabbing tracking links and creatives, watching their own numbers, and getting notified of conversions — and why great self-service is quietly one of the best retention tools a program has.
The affiliate portal from the program manager's side: access, control, and what stays private
The partner portal seen from the other side of the glass — how you grant and revoke access, give several people at one partner their own logins, preview the portal as any partner to troubleshoot, and enforce the wall that keeps your economics invisible.
The building blocks of an affiliate program: offers, campaigns, and partners
A plain-language tour of the objects every affiliate program is built from — advertisers, offers, contracts, campaigns, affiliates, approvals, and channels — and how they connect.
Measurement
How clicks become attributed revenue, and what every number in your reports really means.
Affiliate conversion pixels: get notified the moment a conversion records
A practical guide for affiliates on registering a postback URL or HTML pixel so your own tracker or CRM hears about every conversion in real time — the two pixel types, the tokens you can pass, and how to read the fire log.
Affiliate pixels and postbacks: notifying your partners when a conversion lands
How outbound affiliate pixels work — server-to-server postbacks versus browser HTML pixels, why one is reliable and one is conditional, how tokens carry the right data, and why an affiliate's payout should be the only number that ever leaves your program.
Affiliate reports: how partners read their own clicks, conversions, and payouts
What a partner should be able to measure about their own traffic — daily trends, campaign and creative breakdowns, source-level performance by sub-ID, and conversion-by-conversion detail — and why giving partners granular self-service reporting makes them better at their job and easier to keep.
Clicks but no conversions: a step-by-step troubleshooting checklist
A calm, ordered checklist for the most common affiliate reporting scare — clicks are flowing but conversions are not showing up — starting with the one log that splits the problem in two.
Conversion pixels and server-to-server postbacks, explained
How a conversion gets reported back to your tracker — the image pixel versus the S2S postback, the click ID that anchors attribution, the transaction ID that prevents duplicates, and the JSON response you can store in your CRM.
Funnel comparison: every affiliate's funnel side by side
How lining funnels up next to each other exposes which partners carry clicks through to conversion and which stall early — reading a funnel matrix, switching between count, share, and step-conversion metrics, and adding click-to-stage timing.
How conversions get attributed to the affiliate who earned them
The click-to-conversion chain explained — click IDs, cookie fallback, first vs last touch, what "unattributed" really means, and why payouts are frozen at click time.
The affiliate metrics glossary: clicks, conversions, EPC, and revenue
What every number in an affiliate report actually means — clicks and unique visitors, conversions versus events, revenue versus payout, EPC, conversion rate, profit, margin, and unattributed conversions.
The pixel log: reading exactly what happened to every conversion attempt
What the pixel log records, what each disposition means and how to fix it, why the same codes come back in your server response, and how long the entries stick around before they age out.
The reports guide: which affiliate report answers which question
A map of affiliate program reporting — the analytics command center, the row-level clicks and conversions reports, the offer/affiliate/advertiser rollups, why some traffic is excluded from totals, and the timezone every date is read in.
Why we use our own affiliate tracker as our web analytics (and how)
LimeliJourney's marketing site runs on LimeliJourney — no GA4, no consent banner, no third-party vendor. Here is the actual setup behind "we track our own site with our own tracker."
Optimization
Read your traffic one layer deeper, then act on what you find.
AI autopilot for affiliate programs: safe, reversible changes while you sleep
What it means to let an AI operator apply changes to your affiliate program unattended — the layered permissions that gate it, the built-in limits on what it can touch and how far, and why every automated change is auditable and reversible.
AI creative studio: generating ad copy and banners from a brief
How AI creative generation fits an affiliate program — turning a short brief into ad copy and banner images that land directly in an offer's creative library, why generating variants beats editing, and how credit-based billing works.
AI insights: a daily review that watches your affiliate program for you
How a proactive AI review of an affiliate program works — the daily deep read and the hourly threshold checks, why a quiet account correctly sees nothing, and how findings turn into proposed fixes you approve.
Caps and budget protection: limiting volume without pausing anything
How click and conversion caps protect budgets and enforce volume commitments — the three levels they live on, the intervals they count over, and the difference between stopping over-cap traffic and letting it flow while deciding who still gets paid.
Conversion review: how to hold conversions for approval before you pay
A guide to putting a checkpoint between a recorded conversion and a paid one — how to hold new conversions in Pending, what pending means for billing and affiliate postbacks, and how to approve, reject, or flag conversions as tests.
Sub-IDs (s1 to s5): segment, block, and re-price affiliate traffic
How sub-IDs let you see which source inside an affiliate is really performing — the s1 traffic-source convention, sub-ID reporting, blocking a junk source, and paying a good source differently.
Traffic rules and the global redirect: deciding who gets served
How to allow or block clicks per offer by country, device, referrer, URL parameter, or IP — the allowlist-versus-blocklist trap that catches everyone, where stopped traffic goes, and how to review what was blocked.
Setup
The groundwork that decides how much of your data survives the modern web.
API keys done right: IP allowlists, request logs, and the habits that keep access safe
What separates a safe API integration from a leaky one — scoped keys shown once, IP allowlists that pin a key to your servers, a request log that turns a leak into a lookup, and the rotation habits that make revoking a key painless instead of scary.
Affiliate accounting: turning confirmed conversions into invoices you can pay
How self-billing works in an affiliate program — building invoices from confirmed conversions only, handling adjustments and clawbacks, payment thresholds that carry a balance forward, VAT, and the difference between issuing and paying.
Affiliate approvals: controlling who can promote which offers
A guide to the approvals workflow — how affiliates apply to run non-public offers, the one rule that clears up most confusion (approvals gate portal discovery, not campaigns), how to work the queue, and when to suspend versus reject.
Affiliate tracking links: what they carry, and why the destination is decided at click time
How a tracking link actually works — why it carries only IDs and no baked-in URL, how the destination is resolved live so changing a landing page updates links already in the wild, and how to test one before you send it.
Campaigns explained: pairing one affiliate with one offer
A guide to the campaign — the link between a single affiliate and a single offer — covering how to create one, the per-affiliate overrides for payout, landing page, and channel, how statuses control serving, and the test flow before going live.
Click pixels and direct tracking: recording a click without a redirect
When to track a click without sending traffic through a redirect — the sitewide SDK versus a single-affiliate tag, which URL parameters the pixel captures, and how the click ID still reaches your conversion pixel.
Creating and managing offers: statuses, visibility, and deduplication
A guide to the offer — the thing your affiliates promote — covering how to create one, what its status does to live traffic, how affiliate visibility works, expiration and redirects, and how deduplication stops the same sale being paid twice.
Getting started with the affiliate tracking API
A developer's orientation to the LimeliJourney API — your first call, how authentication works with an API key, the read and write endpoints in v1, filters and pagination, and the response envelope every endpoint shares.
How affiliate-platform billing should work: flat fee, honest overages, and a price you can trust
What good SaaS billing looks like for an affiliate platform — one flat monthly fee plus itemized overages, a price locked at signup so future catalog changes never reprice you, automatic charging, and the one promise that matters most: your tracking never stops over a billing hiccup.
How to build an affiliate tracking link (and why it never breaks)
A plain-language walkthrough for affiliates on building a tracking link — why it already carries your affiliate ID, how the destination is resolved at click time, and how sub-IDs let you compare your own traffic sources.
Redirect tokens: passing click data through to your landing page
How to hand the destination page real values from the click — the click ID, sub-IDs, affiliate, country, device and more — using #token# placeholders, either offer-wide or on a single landing page URL.
Team and roles: giving your people the right access without the wrong risk
How a two-role model — admins who govern and staff who operate — lets a program delegate day-to-day work freely while keeping account-wide settings, billing, and the roster in trusted hands, plus the guardrails that stop you from ever locking yourself out.
The creative library: one asset, every affiliate's tracking baked in
How a creative library works in an affiliate program — why creatives belong to offers, tracking each asset separately with batch upload, and the link tokenization that puts every affiliate's own tracking link into the same creative automatically.
Verticals in affiliate marketing: the category that anchors your attribution
What a vertical is, why it's an attribution anchor stamped onto every click and conversion, why you can rename freely but can't change an offer's vertical once it has traffic, and how archiving preserves history instead of deleting it.
Why your affiliate links belong on your own tracking domain
What a tracking domain is, why running links and pixels on a domain you own beats a shared host, and how a one-time set of DNS records brings it live automatically.
The journey ends where yours begins.
Reading is one thing; seeing it on your own numbers is another. Book a demo and we'll walk your program through the platform with you.