Caps and budget protection: limiting volume without pausing anything

A cap is a volume limit — no more than N clicks or conversions per interval. Caps are how you protect a budget, honor an advertiser's volume commitment, or throttle a suspect traffic source, all without pausing anything outright. They sit quietly in the background and only act when a line is crossed, which makes them one of the most useful controls a program manager has.

Where caps live

Caps can be set at three levels, and every level that applies is enforced together:

• Offer — caps the offer across all affiliates.
• Campaign — caps one affiliate on one offer.
• Affiliate — caps that affiliate across everything they run.

Each level has an independent click cap and conversion cap, each with its own toggle and limit, so you can mix a hard conversion ceiling on an offer with a click throttle on a single risky partner.

The interval a cap counts over

Every cap counts within a window: daily (resets at midnight UTC), weekly (resets Monday), monthly (resets on the 1st), total (a running count since an optional start date), or a custom rolling window of the last N days you choose.

What happens when a cap is hit

When the limit is reached, the cap's over-cap behavior decides what happens to further traffic in that window. There are two choices, and they are meaningfully different.

Redirect stops the traffic. A capped click is not recorded and the visitor is sent to the cap's redirect destination; a capped conversion is dropped entirely and shows in your pixel log as cap_rejected. Choose Redirect when the budget is genuinely hard and you do not want to owe anything past the line.

Continue keeps the traffic flowing and recorded — but you decide who still gets paid through a payment setting. You can pay everyone as normal (the cap is just a marker), bill the advertiser while zeroing the affiliate's payout, pay the affiliate while zeroing the advertiser side, or pay nobody and simply keep the data for visibility. Whichever you pick, the decision is stamped onto each click or conversion when it fires and never recomputed, so your reports stay stable.

When several caps hit at once

If more than one cap is over at the same moment — say a campaign cap and an offer cap — the most restrictive one wins. If any hit cap says Redirect, the traffic is stopped. If all of them say Continue, their payment suppressions combine: a side is zeroed if any active cap suppresses it.

Fail-soft by design

A cap check can never break live traffic. If a cap cannot be evaluated for any reason, the click or conversion is served exactly as if no cap existed. Counting is advisory too, so under very high concurrency a tiny overage past the limit is possible — a deliberate trade that keeps a budget rule from ever costing you a real sale.

A few recipes

• A hard daily test budget for a new affiliate: a campaign conversion cap, daily, set to Redirect.
• An advertiser who bought exactly 500 conversions this month: an offer conversion cap of 500, monthly — Redirect to stop at the line, or Continue with the affiliate zeroed if you want to keep measuring the overflow.
• Suspicious click volume from one partner: an affiliate click cap, daily, Redirect — it throttles them everywhere at once.

Want us to look at your real volumes and set protective caps with you? Book a demo and we will tune them together.