Suppression List

A suppression list is an exclusion list — a set of people or sources that a program deliberately keeps out. The term is used a few ways in affiliate and performance marketing, and the common thread is "these should not count":

• Contact suppression. In email and lead-gen, a list of addresses or phone numbers that must not be marketed to again — unsubscribes, existing customers, or people who opted out. Affiliates are expected to scrub against it so nobody is contacted who shouldn't be.
• Source suppression. A list of traffic sources, placements, or sub-IDs blocked from an offer because they send junk, fraud, or non-compliant traffic.
• Duplicate suppression. Excluding a person who has already converted so they can't be counted or paid twice.

Why suppression matters

Suppression protects three things at once: compliance (you don't remarket to someone who opted out), budget (you don't pay for traffic or leads you've decided to exclude), and data quality (excluded activity doesn't pollute your metrics). A program without any suppression pays for its own worst traffic and risks contacting people it legally shouldn't.

A worked example

You discover that one placement, s1=incentivized_wall, sends users who sign up and never engage. Rather than pause the whole affiliate, you suppress that one source on the offer: its clicks are no longer served and its conversions no longer credited. Separately, your CRM holds a do-not-contact file of 4,000 opted-out emails; you require affiliates to scrub leads against it, and you dedup incoming leads on email so a suppressed or already-known contact can't be counted a second time.

How this works in LimeliJourney

LimeliJourney gives you the building blocks for suppression across your partners and offers, under honest names for what each one does. To suppress a source, add its value to Blocked Sub-IDs on a campaign's Caps & Limits tab, or write a traffic rule that blocks a geo, device, referrer, or IP range at click time. To suppress duplicate people, use dedup rules on email or phone — they hash the identifier and prevent the same person being counted twice across different transaction IDs, so conversion deduplication doubles as person-level suppression. Contact-level do-not-market lists live in your own CRM or ESP; LimeliJourney stitches lead identity into tenant-scoped contacts you can reconcile against it.