Campaigns explained: pairing one affiliate with one offer

If the offer is what gets promoted, the campaign is who promotes it and on what terms. A campaign is the link between one affiliate and one offer — and once you understand that it is a pairing, everything else about it falls into place. The campaign is where the payout for that specific partner lives, which landing page they send traffic to, what channel their traffic is classified as, and whether they are serving at all. This guide covers how to create a campaign, the overrides that let you treat each partner individually, how status governs live traffic, and the guided test flow that lets you prove a setup works before a single real click lands.

What a campaign is

An offer is the product or promotion an advertiser wants traffic for. An affiliate is the partner who can send that traffic. A campaign is what you get when you pair them, and it carries everything specific to that one pairing: the payout the affiliate earns per conversion, the landing page their visitors reach, the channel their traffic is attributed to, and its own status independent of the offer.

This one-affiliate-one-offer structure is what makes a program manageable at scale. You can pay two affiliates different rates on the same offer, send them to different landing pages, and pause one without touching the other — all because each pairing is its own object with its own settings. When you look at your campaigns list, you are looking at every active relationship in your program with its live performance attached.

Creating a campaign

Creating one is quick: pick the affiliate, pick the offer, and you have the pairing. From there a few choices refine it.

You can give it a name, or leave it blank and let it be auto-named from the offer, contract, price format, and payout — something like Acme Trial - CPA - $35.00, or a RevShare version showing the percentage. The auto-name is genuinely useful because it tells you at a glance what the campaign pays without opening it; you can always rename it later.

You can pick a channel — the traffic type used for attribution — or leave it blank to use the affiliate's default. You choose the offer's contract, which is what the campaign's payout inherits from, and you can set inline overrides right there. And you set a starting status, which defaults to active.

One thing you do not do is set a price from scratch: a new campaign inherits its payout from the contract you selected, and you override from there if you want to. This keeps the economics anchored to the offer's real terms rather than a number typed in isolation.

Here is the detail that trips up newcomers, so it is worth stating plainly: creating a campaign needs no approval step. Creating the campaign automatically grants that affiliate access to the offer in their portal. You never have to pre-approve an affiliate before pairing them with an offer. Approvals are a separate, inbound mechanism that only controls which non-public offers affiliates can discover on their own — covered in the affiliate approvals guide. If you already know you want a partner on an offer, creating the campaign is the single action that sets up the pairing, the payout, the tracking link, and the access grant all at once.

Overrides: treating each partner individually

The campaign is where you tailor terms per affiliate without disturbing the offer's defaults. Three overrides matter most.

The payout override lets you pay this one affiliate a different rate than the contract's baseline. The card shows the contract value alongside an override field, and the effective payout is the override if set, otherwise the contract value. This is how you reward a high-performing partner or match a rate you negotiated over email — for that pairing only, without touching what anyone else earns.

The landing page override lets you send this affiliate's traffic to a specific one of the offer's landing pages rather than the default. Useful when a partner's audience converts better on a particular variant.

The channel override reclassifies this affiliate's traffic type for attribution purposes.

There is also a caps-and-limits area for click and conversion caps on the pairing, and a lightweight contact pipeline to track your outreach to the partner as you bring them live. The precedence rules that decide which payout number actually applies — contract, then campaign override, then sub-ID override — are covered in contracts and payouts, and sub-ID-level payouts are where you can pay a single traffic source within an affiliate differently, detailed in the sub-IDs guide.

Status: what serves and what does not

A campaign's status controls serving for that affiliate on that offer, independent of the offer's own status. Active serves traffic. Paused stops it — clicks are no longer served for that affiliate on that offer, without touching the offer or any other partner. Pending still serves traffic; it is a label you can use while finishing setup, not a stop. A deleted status also stops serving.

You can also set an expiration date on the campaign, after which it stops serving automatically — the clean way to time-box a specific partner's run.

When a campaign is stopped for any reason — paused, deleted, past its expiration, or archived — its clicks are not counted as normal traffic. They are recorded as blocked and sent down a fallback chain: the campaign's own fallback redirect URL if one is set, otherwise the offer's redirect, and finally a dead end. This is the campaign-level equivalent of the offer's redirect behavior, and it means in-flight traffic from a paused partner can still be pointed somewhere useful rather than wasted. Setting a fallback redirect before you pause is the difference between recovering that traffic and losing it.

Getting the tracking link

The campaign is where the affiliate's tracking link is generated. There are two modes worth knowing. The default is a redirect link on your tracking domain — the standard, most reliable option. The alternative is direct tracking, where the landing page's own URL carries tracking parameters and the click is captured by a script installed on the page itself; this only tracks if that script is present, and it is covered in depth in the click pixels guide. For most programs the redirect link is the right default. The affiliate-facing view of the same link is covered in getting your tracking link.

You can also download the offer's creatives to hand to the affiliate, or email them their creative pack directly.

Test before you go live

One of the most valuable things about a campaign is that you can prove it works before real traffic touches it. The guided test flow runs through readiness pre-flight checks, a test click, a test conversion, a summary, and a final "review and go live" step. The test click and test conversion are dry runs — nothing is recorded, so your reports stay clean — and the final step flips the campaign to active.

This matters more than it sounds. The most expensive integration bugs are the ones you discover after traffic has been running for a week against a broken pixel. Walking a campaign through the test flow catches a mistyped landing page, a pixel that is not firing, or a payout that is not what you agreed — while it is still cheap to fix.

Archiving

Archiving soft-removes a campaign: it stops serving and is hidden from reports, but nothing is destroyed. Archived campaigns can be revealed with a toggle and restored with a single action, and an archived campaign is read-only until restored. As everywhere else in the platform, you can take a pairing out of circulation without ever losing the history that explains your numbers.

The mental model

Think of the offer as the product and the campaign as the deal. The product's terms are the baseline; each deal can adjust them for one partner. Statuses on the deal control that partner's traffic without disturbing the product or the other partners, and the test flow lets you sign off on a deal before it costs you anything. Once that model clicks, running a program of dozens or hundreds of partners stops feeling like juggling and starts feeling like managing a clean list of relationships.

If you want to see how offers, campaigns, and the affiliate portal fit together into one workflow, the partners feature overview shows it end to end — and a demo will build a real campaign, test it, and take it live with you.