Payout
A payout is the amount an affiliate earns for a conversion. It is the program's cost, set by the offer's terms, and (in a well-built platform) locked in at click time, so the terms an affiliate sent traffic under are the terms they are paid.
Payout is what the affiliate earns per conversion — the commission. From the program's side it is your cost; the amount the advertiser pays you for the same conversion is the received amount, and the gap between them is your margin. Payout is the number affiliates care about most, so how it is set, overridden, and locked in shapes the whole trust relationship of a program.
How payout is set
Payout comes from the offer's contract, and its shape follows the pricing model:
- CPA / CPL / Fixed — a flat amount per conversion.
- RevShare — a percentage of the conversion's revenue.
Different sources can be paid differently without renegotiating the base deal, through overrides applied at more specific levels.
Payout precedence
When several payout figures could apply, the most specific wins:
- Per-sub-ID override — a payout for one traffic source.
- Campaign override — a payout for one affiliate on one offer.
- Contract default — the offer's baseline.
An override only replaces the field it sets; a blank means "fall through to the next level," never "zero."
A worked example
Your offer's contract pays $30 CPA. One affiliate's newsletter source converts so well you set a per-sub-ID override of $40 for s1=newsletter, while everything else stays at $30. A visitor clicks the newsletter link; at that instant the platform stamps $40 onto the click. Two days later you cut the base rate to $25 — but this visitor's eventual conversion still pays $40, because it was frozen at click time. The affiliate is paid exactly the terms they sent that traffic under.
Why freezing at click time matters
If payouts recomputed whenever you edited a contract, yesterday's reports would silently change and affiliates could be paid less than they were promised. Freezing the economics onto the click makes reports stable and the relationship honest: edits only ever affect future traffic.
How this works in LimeliJourney
In LimeliJourney, payout is defined on the offer's contract and managed as part of your partners and offers. The platform snapshots the payout (and the received amount, and whether it's flat or RevShare) onto each click at click time, with precedence sub-ID → campaign → contract. Affiliates see their own payout and payout-based EPC in their portal; you see payout, received, and margin in yours. Conversions can carry a per-conversion payout override on the pixel when a specific conversion warrants it, and conversion review can hold payouts as Pending until you approve them.