Affiliate approvals: controlling who can promote which offers

Not every offer should be visible to every partner. Some are public and open to anyone in your program; others you want to vet applicants for; a few are private and shown only to partners you have deliberately let in. The approvals workflow is how you manage that middle ground — the offers affiliates can ask to promote. It is a genuinely useful tool, but it is also the single most misunderstood part of running a program, because people assume it gates more than it does. This guide explains exactly what approvals control, the one rule that clears up the confusion, and how to work the queue day to day.

What approvals are

Every offer has a visibility setting: public, apply to run, or private. Public offers are visible to all your affiliates in their portal, no gatekeeping. For the other two, an affiliate who finds the offer while browsing can apply to run it — and that application lands in your approvals queue.

Each approval is a decision about exactly one affiliate and one offer: may this affiliate see and work with this offer in their portal? It is a per-offer, per-partner grant, not a blanket status on the affiliate.

It is worth drawing a clear line between two things that sound similar. Approving an application here is not the same as accepting a brand-new affiliate signup. Reviewing a pending affiliate — someone who just joined your program and needs to be let in at all — happens on the affiliates side of the platform. Approvals, by contrast, are for affiliates who are already on your program and are asking for access to a specific non-public offer. Keeping those two review queues distinct in your head saves a lot of "why is this person pending in two places" confusion.

The one rule that clears everything up

Here is the rule that resolves most questions about approvals: approvals gate portal discovery only. They are not a prerequisite for anything else. Specifically:

• Creating a campaign for an affiliate automatically grants them access to that offer. You never need to pre-approve an affiliate before pairing them with an offer. The campaign carries its own access grant.
• A tracking link works because a campaign exists, not because an approval does. Once a campaign is live, the link tracks — no approval required.

So approvals are the inbound direction: affiliates asking you for access to offers they discovered. Campaign creation is the outbound direction: you deciding to put a partner on an offer, which grants access as part of the same step. If you already know you want an affiliate on an offer, you do not go to the approvals queue first — you just create the campaign, and the access comes with it. The campaigns guide covers that path, and it is almost always the better single action when you already know the answer.

Understanding this rule prevents the classic mistake of an affiliate sitting "unapproved" while a manager wonders why their perfectly good campaign is not tracking — the campaign was always enough. Approvals matter specifically when you want affiliates to find and request offers on their own, from a menu you curate.

Setting an offer's visibility

Because approvals only ever come into play for non-public offers, the visibility setting on the offer is what turns the queue on for that offer at all. Public means anyone can promote it immediately, so no applications are generated. Apply to run — the default for new offers — means affiliates can see the offer but must apply, generating the entries you review. Private means the offer does not appear in the portal unless the affiliate already has access, so applications only come from partners you have pointed at it directly. The offers guide covers how visibility combines with status to decide what shows up in an affiliate's portal in the first place.

Working the queue

The approvals view opens on the requests waiting for you. You can filter between pending, approved, rejected, suspended, and all, and narrow the list to a single offer or affiliate. Each row shows the affiliate, the offer, the current status, and when it was requested and decided.

The actions available depend on the current status, and the design makes sure no decision is ever a trap:

• A pending request offers approve or reject. Rejecting lets you add an optional reason, which is shared with the affiliate so they understand the decision rather than just seeing a silent "no."
• An approved grant offers suspend (to temporarily pull access) or reject.
• A rejected application offers approve, if you reconsider.
• A suspended grant offers reinstate (to restore access) or reject.

Decisions apply immediately and the row updates in place. Because you can move a grant between states freely, you never have to hesitate on a decision for fear it is irreversible — a mistaken rejection is one click away from being fixed.

What each decision means to the affiliate

The affiliate sees your decision reflected on the offer's card in their portal: access granted once approved, applied while pending, not approved after a rejection (with your reason if you gave one), and a suspended state if you suspend. Approved offers join the affiliate's own offers list, where they can open the offer, build their tracking link, and grab creatives. This transparency is deliberate — an affiliate who can see why they were declined is far less likely to open a support conversation than one who just watches an offer vanish.

Granting access proactively

You do not have to wait for a request. You can grant an affiliate access to an offer directly — pick the affiliate and the offer and confirm — and they can start promoting it from their portal immediately. This is handy when you have agreed a deal over email and want the offer visible to the partner before any campaign exists.

That said, if the very next step is running traffic, creating the campaign is usually the better single action, because it sets up the pairing, the payout, and the tracking link and grants access all at once. Proactive access-granting is for the case where you want visibility now and the campaign later.

Pixel approvals live here too

The approvals area also handles a separate but related queue: affiliate-submitted conversion pixels waiting for review. When an affiliate registers a postback URL or HTML pixel to be notified of their own conversions, the program can require that pixel be approved before it starts firing — an anti-abuse step, since a pixel is an outbound notification to a third-party system. Each pending pixel shows its type, scope, and content, with approve and reject actions, and there are auto-approve switches if you would rather skip the queue for trusted setups. This is about outbound conversion notifications, not offer access — the affiliate conversion pixels guide covers the affiliate's side of registering one.

Suspend or reject: which to reach for

The two ways to say "not now" have different tones, and choosing the right one keeps relationships intact.

Suspend is reversible pressure. Use it when you are investigating traffic quality or pausing a relationship you expect to resume — reinstating brings access straight back. It signals "hold on," not "we're done."

Reject is the clearer "no," and the optional reason lets you close the loop politely rather than leaving the partner guessing.

One important thing neither does: suspending or rejecting an approval does not touch any existing campaigns. Because approvals only control portal discovery, a partner you suspend can still have live campaigns serving traffic. If you want to actually stop traffic, you pause or archive the campaign itself. This is the same rule from the top of the article, seen from the other end — approvals govern discovery, campaigns govern serving.

The mental model

Picture two doors into an offer. The approvals door is the one affiliates knock on: they discovered the offer and are asking to be let in. The campaign door is the one you open from your side: you decide to put a partner on an offer, and access comes with it. Most day-to-day work goes through the campaign door. The approvals door is for building a curated, self-serve menu that good partners can request from — a way to scale recruitment without hand-building every pairing.

If you want to see how offers, approvals, campaigns, and the affiliate portal fit into one recruitment-to-revenue flow, the partners feature overview shows it whole — and a demo will set up a curated offer with an approval queue on your own program.