Creating and managing offers: statuses, visibility, and deduplication

An offer is the unit of everything in an affiliate program. It is the thing your affiliates actually promote — a product, a signup funnel, a lead form, a free trial — and it belongs to one of your advertisers. Almost every other object in the system hangs off it: contracts define what an offer pays, campaigns pair it with affiliates, landing pages are where its traffic lands, and conversions are the events it counts. Get the offer right and the rest of the program has solid ground to stand on. This guide covers how to create one, and — more importantly — how its settings quietly govern live traffic in ways that are worth understanding before you launch.

Creating an offer

Creating an offer takes three required fields and a handful of optional ones. You give it a name, pick the advertiser it belongs to, and pick a vertical — the category that scopes how attribution works. Everything else, from the description to the finer economics, can wait.

Those three fields are not arbitrary. The advertiser supplies the offer's events and its payout economics, and the vertical scopes attribution, which is why the advertiser and vertical are the offer's attribution anchors. Once an offer has traffic, you cannot change them — doing so would silently re-attribute past clicks and conversions, and rewriting history is exactly what a trustworthy platform must never do. The lesson: choose the advertiser and vertical deliberately at creation, because they are effectively permanent the moment real traffic flows.

A fresh offer starts bare. To make it live you add a contract (the payout terms — required before conversions carry any money), a landing page (where traffic goes), and you grab the conversion pixel the advertiser installs to report sales back. Our guide to contracts and payouts covers the money side in depth, and the landing pages guide covers destinations and how they are resolved.

Status: is this offer live right now?

Every offer carries a status — active, paused, or pending — plus expired, which is derived from a date rather than set by hand. Status answers exactly one question: is this offer serving traffic right now? It is deliberately kept separate from who is allowed to see the offer, so you never have to reason about a single tangled combined state.

The critical thing to internalize is that status is not just a label. Any offer that is not active stops serving traffic. When someone clicks an affiliate's tracking link for a stopped offer, the click is not recorded — no stats, no payout — and one of two things happens next. If the offer has a redirect URL configured, the visitor is sent there, which is how you point dead traffic at a backup offer or your homepage rather than a broken page. If no redirect is set, the visitor hits a graceful dead end.

This is worth planning for before you ever pause an offer. Traffic does not stop the instant you flip a status — affiliates may have live placements, cached links, and scheduled emails that keep sending visitors. A redirect URL turns that in-flight traffic into something useful instead of wasting it.

Expiration: a status on a timer

You can give an offer an expiry date. Once that date passes, the offer displays as expired everywhere regardless of its stored status, and traffic stops serving exactly as if it were paused — same redirect-or-dead-end behavior. The offer is not deleted or altered; clearing or extending the date brings it straight back. Because "expired" is derived from the date, it is not something you set manually — it simply becomes true when the clock says so.

Expiration is the clean way to run a time-boxed promotion. Set the date, and the offer retires itself on schedule without anyone having to remember to pause it at midnight.

The three landing-page-adjacent economics: attribution, windows, and duplicates

An offer carries a few attribution settings that quietly shape your data quality.

The payment model decides, when several affiliates sent the same visitor, which click gets the credit and the payout. Last touch — the default — credits the most recent click before the conversion. First touch credits the earliest click inside the attribution window, so the affiliate who introduced the visitor keeps the sale even if a later affiliate's click ID rides in on the pixel. Our attribution guide walks through the full rules and the edge cases.

The attribution window sets how long after a click a conversion can still be credited to it when the pixel arrives without a click ID and the tracker has to fall back to a cookie. Thirty days suits most offers; ninety fits considered purchases; three hundred sixty-five fits very long sales cycles. A pixel that carries an explicit click ID always anchors the match regardless of age.

Duplicate-click flagging keeps your click counts honest. A repeat click on the same link by the same visitor within a short window is still redirected normally but flagged as a duplicate and left out of click counts — so a visitor who clicks twice does not read as two people. You can tune the window or disable the flagging per offer.

Deduplication: never pay for the same sale twice

Separately from duplicate clicks, offers control duplicate conversions — the safeguard that stops the same order or the same lead being counted and paid twice. This is one of the highest-stakes settings in the whole program, because a deduplication gap is money leaving the building.

There are three levers, usually inherited from the advertiser's defaults unless you override them for a specific offer. You can deduplicate on transaction ID, so the same order number fired twice collapses onto one conversion rather than paying twice for a retry or a page refresh. You can add dedup rules that match the same person or order across different transaction IDs — by email, by phone, or by a combination of the parameters your pixel sends — which catches the case where the same buyer comes back through a slightly different path. And you can decide whether to allow more than one conversion per click at all.

A caught duplicate is not thrown away; it is recorded, tagged as a duplicate with zero revenue and payout, and fires no affiliate postback, so you can review exactly what was caught and why. The mechanics of how transaction IDs and dedup rules work at the pixel level are covered in the conversion pixels guide — but the offer is where you decide the policy.

Affiliate visibility: who can discover this offer

Separate from status, an offer's visibility controls what affiliates can find in their portal. Public means every affiliate can see it and start promoting immediately. Apply to run — the default for new offers — means affiliates can see it but must apply for access, and their applications land in your approvals queue. Private means the offer is invisible in the portal unless the affiliate already has access.

Status and visibility combine automatically: the portal's "browse all offers" view only shows offers that are both discoverable and currently serving, so a paused or expired offer drops out of browse on its own. Two things visibility never does: it never blocks you from creating a campaign for any affiliate on the offer, and it never stops an existing tracking link from working — the offer's status governs serving, not its visibility. When you create a campaign, the affiliate is granted access to that offer as part of the same step, which is why our campaigns guide notes that pairing an affiliate with an offer is usually the faster path than pre-approving them.

Archiving instead of deleting

Offers are never hard-deleted — they are archived, so history and reporting stay intact. An archived offer disappears from the default list and stops serving traffic under the same rules as any non-active offer, and it can be restored at any time, exactly as it was. This is the same additive-first philosophy that runs through the whole platform: you can always take something out of circulation, but you never destroy the record that lets you explain last quarter's numbers.

Putting it together

A well-configured offer is one where the attribution anchors were chosen deliberately, a redirect URL catches stopped traffic, deduplication is tight enough that no sale pays twice, and visibility matches how you actually recruit affiliates. Spend the few extra minutes on these settings at creation and you save yourself the far larger cost of untangling bad data later.

If you want to see how offers, contracts, campaigns, and attribution fit into one coherent program, the tracking feature overview shows the moving parts together — and a demo will set up a real offer end to end with you, from advertiser to first attributed conversion.