Getting started with affiliate tracking: from empty account to first conversion

The gap between signing up for an affiliate platform and seeing your first attributed conversion is where a lot of programs stall. Not because any single step is hard, but because the steps have an order, and doing them out of order — or skipping the one that takes time to activate — leaves you stuck at the finish line waiting for something you should have started at the beginning. This walkthrough takes a brand-new account from empty to a tracked, attributed conversion, in the sequence that actually works. If you want the concepts behind the objects first, the core concepts guide is the companion to this one; here we're building.

Start the clock on your tracking domain

The single most important sequencing lesson: add your tracking domain first, before anything else, because it's the one step with a delay you don't control.

Tracking links and conversion pixels are served from a domain you own — something like track.yourbrand.com — and you cannot generate a single working link until yours is live. Serving tracking from your own domain rather than a shared platform domain is what keeps your links first-party, which is increasingly what keeps them working at all as browsers clamp down on third-party tracking. That's covered in depth in the tracking domains guide, and it's worth reading, because this choice affects how much of your data survives.

The work on your side is small: add the domain and create the DNS records it gives you. But verification, the security certificate, and going fully live all happen automatically afterward, and while that's usually quick, it isn't instant. Kick it off first and it'll be ready by the time you reach the step that needs it. Leave it to last and you'll be sitting on a finished setup unable to generate a link. Start the clock now.

Build the object chain

With the domain activating in the background, you build the four records that make attribution possible. They form a chain, each depending on the one before, so the order here isn't optional either.

Create an advertiser. The advertiser is the company whose product is being promoted — often, for an in-house program, just your own company. Every offer belongs to one advertiser, so it's the first record to exist. The advertisers guide explains how the advertiser's event catalog later decides what counts as a conversion, but to start, a name is enough.

Create an offer with a contract. The offer is the thing affiliates promote — a product, a signup page, a funnel — and it belongs to the advertiser you just made. The contract on the offer is where the money is defined: the payout the affiliate earns per conversion, and the received amount the advertiser pays you. You'll choose a format here — a flat amount per conversion, or a percentage of revenue — and set a landing page, the destination visitors actually reach. The offers guide covers the options; the key idea is that the contract is what makes an offer economically real.

Add an affiliate. The affiliate is whoever sends you traffic. Like the advertiser, all you truly need is a name — everything else fills in later. If you add a contact email, you can invite them straight into their own portal, which gets them self-serving their links instead of waiting on you.

Create a campaign linking them. This is the step that ties it all together: a campaign connects one affiliate to one offer under one contract. It's what makes that affiliate's tracking link attribute to them and pay at the right rate. Without a campaign, a click has no affiliate and no terms, so it can't be attributed or paid — which is exactly why "unattributed" traffic so often traces back to a missing campaign. The campaigns guide goes deeper, but the chain is the thing to internalize: advertiser holds offer, offer carries contract, campaign binds affiliate to offer.

Generate the tracking link

By now your domain should be active. With the object chain in place, generating a tracking link is the easy part: pick the offer, the affiliate, and the campaign, and the link is minted. Let the landing page default to the offer's resolved default rather than typing a URL — that way the link follows the offer's landing page even if you change it later, so you never hand out a link that goes stale.

This link is the whole point of everything before it. Every click on it is recorded and attributed to that affiliate, at the terms their campaign's contract set. Give it to your partner and the inbound half of tracking is live.

Install the conversion pixel

Clicks are only half the story; you also need to know when those clicks turn into conversions. The conversion pixel is a small snippet the advertiser's site fires when someone converts — signs up, buys, whatever counts for that offer — and it reports the conversion back so it can be matched to the click that earned it.

You place the image-pixel snippet on the conversion or thank-you page, or use a server-to-server call if a developer prefers a backend integration. Either way, the pixel closes the loop: a click came in, a conversion fired, and the two get matched into an attributed, payable event. The full mechanics — including how to carry the click ID through so matching is reliable — live in the conversion pixel documentation, and if conversions don't show up as expected, the no-conversions troubleshooting guide is the place to start.

See your first report

Once clicks and conversions flow, the numbers arrive. A headline view gives you clicks, conversions, revenue, payout, and profit over a date range, each compared against the previous period so you see direction as well as magnitude. Row-level reports let you verify a specific click or conversion happened, and per-entity reports rank your offers, affiliates, and advertisers. The full map of which report answers which question is in the reports guide — but the milestone that matters right now is simpler: you clicked your own link, fired your own pixel, and watched an attributed conversion appear. That's the whole system working, end to end.

Test it before you trust it

Before you hand a single link to a real partner, run the whole chain yourself once. Generate a tracking link on a test campaign, click it, let it redirect to your landing page, and then fire the conversion pixel — either by completing a test conversion on the page or by hitting the pixel directly. Then open your reports and watch the click appear, the conversion match to it, and the payout resolve at the contract's terms. That end-to-end dry run takes a few minutes and catches the vast majority of setup mistakes while they're still cheap: a pixel on the wrong page, a campaign that didn't link the right contract, a landing page that drops the click ID before the visitor converts.

This self-test is also the fastest way to build an intuition for how attribution actually works, because you see the exact chain the attribution guide describes happen on your own data — click recorded, click ID minted, conversion fired, the two matched, the affiliate credited. Once you've watched it work once, you'll trust the numbers when real traffic arrives, and you'll know exactly what a healthy setup looks like when you need to diagnose one that isn't. Skipping this step is the single most common reason a program's first real conversions come back unattributed and nobody knows why.

The order is the lesson

If there's one thing to take from this walkthrough, it's that setup is a sequence, not a checklist you can do in any order. The domain goes first because it takes time. The object chain goes in dependency order because each record needs the one before it. The link comes after the chain because it needs all four records. And the pixel comes last because it closes a loop the rest of the setup opens. Follow that order and a new program goes live smoothly; jump around and you hit avoidable walls.

LimeliJourney is built to make this sequence fast — the domain activates on its own, the records take seconds each, and the first conversion is often minutes away once traffic flows. If you'd rather have it stood up with you — your domain wired, your first offer live, a test conversion traced from click to report — the tracking feature overview shows the machinery, and a demo will build your first working setup alongside you.