Offer Cap
An offer cap is a volume limit on an offer, for example no more than 500 conversions this month, or 1,000 clicks per day. When the cap is reached, further traffic is either stopped or kept flowing unpaid, protecting budgets and honoring an advertiser's volume commitment.
A cap is a volume limit: "no more than N clicks or conversions per interval." An offer cap applies that limit at the offer level, across every affiliate running it. Caps exist to protect budgets, to enforce an advertiser's volume commitment (they bought exactly 500 leads this month, not 5,000), and to throttle a suspect traffic source without pausing anything outright.
Click caps vs conversion caps
A click cap limits how many clicks an offer will serve; a conversion cap limits how many conversions it will record and pay. Each has its own interval — daily, weekly, monthly, a running total, or a rolling custom window — and the reset boundaries are always in UTC.
What happens when the cap is hit
The cap's over-cap behavior decides:
- Redirect — over-cap traffic is stopped. A capped click is not recorded and the visitor is sent to a fallback URL; a capped conversion is dropped and logged. Use this when the budget is truly hard and you do not want to owe anything past the line.
- Continue — traffic keeps flowing and recording, but you choose who gets paid via the payment disposition: everyone, advertiser-only, affiliate-only, or nobody. Use this to keep measuring the overflow without paying for it.
A worked example
An advertiser buys 500 lead conversions for the month. You set an offer conversion cap of 500, Monthly, Redirect. The 500th lead converts on the 22nd; from that moment, further conversions are dropped and logged with a cap_rejected note, so you never owe payout on a lead the advertiser will not pay you for. Had you instead chosen Continue + advertiser_only, the overflow leads would still record and still bill the advertiser, but affiliate payouts on them would be zeroed — useful when you want the data but not the cost.
Caps also stack: caps can sit on the offer, the campaign, and the affiliate at once, and the most restrictive wins. Caps are also fail-soft — if a cap can't be evaluated, traffic is served as if no cap existed, so a cap check never breaks live traffic.
How this works in LimeliJourney
In LimeliJourney, offer caps live on the offer's Caps & Limits tab; campaign and affiliate caps live on their own cards, and all that apply are enforced together. Managing caps is part of running your partners and offers day to day: set a hard daily test budget for a new affiliate, throttle a suspicious source everywhere at once, or hold an advertiser's exact volume commitment. Zeroing from a Continue cap is stamped onto each click or conversion at fire time and never recomputed, so reports stay stable. You can also ask LimeliChat to review current volumes and propose or apply cap changes.