The building blocks of an affiliate program: offers, campaigns, and partners

Every affiliate program, no matter how large, is built from a small set of objects that connect to each other. Learn what each one does and the whole system stops feeling like a maze: offers hang off advertisers, campaigns link a partner to an offer, and clicks and conversions flow along those connections into your reports. Here is the map.

Advertiser

The advertiser is the company whose product is being promoted. Often that is simply your own business. It can also be a partner brand you run traffic for. Each advertiser owns its contacts and an event catalog: the list of actions (a lead, a sale, a funded account) that count as outcomes for that advertiser.

Offer

An offer is an advertiser's product or promotion that affiliates send traffic to. An offer carries:

• One or more contracts (the money terms, described below).
• One or more landing pages (the destination URLs).
• A vertical (its category), a status, and an optional expiration date. An offer that is expired or not active stops serving traffic; clicks are sent to a fallback URL if you have set one.
• A visibility setting that controls which affiliates can discover and apply for the offer in their portal. This is a discovery gate, not a permission gate: it is never required for a tracking link to work.

Contract

A contract holds the money terms attached to an offer. Each one defines the payout (what the affiliate earns per conversion) and the received amount (what the advertiser pays you). The gap between them is your margin. Contracts can be flat amounts (CPA, CPC, CPM, or fixed) or RevShare, a percentage of each conversion's revenue.

Campaign

A campaign is the link between one affiliate and one offer, through one of that offer's contracts. This is the object that actually runs traffic and produces a tracking link. A campaign can override the contract's payout, the landing page, and the channel for that specific affiliate, and it has its own status. Pausing a campaign stops that one affiliate on that one offer without touching anyone else.

Affiliate

An affiliate is a traffic partner, sometimes called a publisher. Affiliates have an account manager on your team, a default channel, contacts, and an account status. Each one gets a portal to browse offers, grab creatives, and watch their own performance.

Approval

An approval is a per-affiliate, per-offer decision (pending, approved, rejected, or suspended) for affiliates who request a non-public offer from their portal. It exists only for portal discovery. You never have to approve anything before creating a campaign: when you build a campaign, portal access to that offer is granted to the affiliate automatically.

Channel

A channel classifies where traffic came from (for example Affiliate, Direct, or Email). Every affiliate can carry a default channel, and a campaign can override it.

How they fit together

Here is the whole chain in one line. An advertiser owns offers, each with contracts and landing pages. An affiliate is connected to an offer by a campaign, which produces the tracking link. Clicks arrive on that link; conversions come back on a pixel; and your reports break everything down by these same objects.

Once the model clicks, the rest of the platform reads like a map you already know. From here, follow how a conversion gets tied back to the affiliate who earned it, or how each number in your reports is defined.

Want to see it against your own program? Book a demo and we will map your offers, contracts, and first campaign live with you.