Welcome to Aftrad! This guide walks you through everything you need to set up your first campaign in the Performance Hub — from your first Advertiser to monitoring live traffic. Watch the video for the full walkthrough, and open each step's article for the details.
What you'll set up in this guide
Aftrad's Performance Hub is built around three pieces that work together:
Advertisers — the brands whose offers you promote.
Affiliates — the traffic partners who send clicks to those offers.
Offers — the campaigns that connect Advertisers with Affiliates: tracking, payouts, targeting and visibility.
Once these three are in place and connected, Aftrad handles the full click-to-conversion flow: it tracks each click, receives the conversion from the Advertiser, and fires a postback to the Affiliate.
Example used in the video
Record | Example | Key settings |
Advertiser | Lumora Cosmetics | Status: Active |
Affiliate | Brightpath Media | Status: Active · Default Postback: |
Offer | Lumora Vitamin C Serum | CPA · Web · Sale · Public · Countries: Spain, Italy, France · Advertiser payout 10 · Affiliate payout 7 · Margin 30% |
Step 1 — Create your first Advertiser
An Advertiser is the brand or company whose offers you manage. You need at least one before you can create an Offer.
What you'll do: go to Home → Advertisers and click Create. Enter the Name, set the Status (Active, so its offers can receive traffic) and choose the Advertiser Manager. Timezone and Default event domain are pre-filled with your network settings. Everything else is optional; click Save.
Note: By default, a new Advertiser is Postpaid. If you need Prepaid, change the payment method in its Account Balance tab afterwards.
Step 2 — Create your first Affiliate
An Affiliate is a traffic partner who sends clicks to your Offers.
What you'll do: go to Performance → Affiliates and click Create. Enter the Name, set the Status to Active so they can send traffic, and choose the Affiliate Manager. Billing and traffic settings come with default values; click Save.
💡 Tip: It's good practice to also create an internal test Affiliate from the start, to check your integrations before going live.
Step 3 — Create your first Offer
An Offer is the campaign itself. It connects an Advertiser's product with the Affiliates who promote it.
What you'll do: go to Home → Offers, click Create and choose the offer model (for example, CPA). Then:
Choose the Advertiser and enter the Offer name, Device, Status, Type and Conversion flow.
Add the Marketplace information your affiliates will see: Preview URL, Preview image, Category, Description and KPI.
Enter the Tracking URL provided by the Advertiser, with the
{click_id}macro, so every conversion can be attributed to its click.Set the Visibility: Public, Protected or Private.
Optionally, limit the countries in Targeting.
In Payouts & Events, set the default payout: what the Advertiser pays (Advertiser payout), what the Affiliate gets (Affiliate payout), and the Margin, calculated for you.
Step 4 — Set up the Advertiser Postback URL
For Aftrad to record a conversion, the Advertiser must notify Aftrad when one happens. They do it by calling your Postback URL.
What you'll do: open the Advertiser and go to its Postback URL tab. Share the URL with the Advertiser: on each conversion, they call it and send back the click_id that Aftrad passed in the original click.
Note: The click_id is what lets Aftrad attribute each conversion to the right Offer and Affiliate.
Step 5 — Configure the Affiliate Postback
When Aftrad records a conversion, it notifies the Affiliate through their postback URL.
What you'll do: go to Performance → Affiliates, open the Affiliate and click General → Postbacks. Open the Default Postback and paste the postback URL provided by the Affiliate. Then replace the Affiliate's own placeholders with Aftrad macros, so each notification carries the values they need. Table view shows one row per parameter, which makes this easy. The most common macros:
Macro | What Aftrad sends |
| The click ID the Affiliate sent to Aftrad with the click |
| The payout the Affiliate earns for the conversion |
For example, https://example.com/postback?sub1=[click]&payout=[amount] becomes https://example.com/postback?sub1={affiliate_click_id}&payout={payout}.
Step 6 — Get the Tracking URL for your Affiliates
Each Affiliate needs their own Tracking URL: the link they place in their campaigns to send traffic to your Offer.
What you'll do: open the Offer and go to its AFFILIATES tab. In the Affiliate's row, open the Actions menu (⋯) and choose Copy Offer tracking link, or Offer tracking link builder to adjust its parameters first. If the Affiliate has access to the Affiliate Marketplace, they can also copy the link there themselves.
Step 7 — Test the integration
Before sending real traffic, check that the flow works end to end: from the Affiliate's click to the conversion and the postback Aftrad sends to the Affiliate.
What you'll do: to check the integration of the Affiliate's postback, use Test link: in the Offer's AFFILIATES tab, open the Affiliate's Actions menu (⋯) and choose Test link.
Note: Test conversions appear in Advertiser Events, but they are not counted in general Statistics.
Step 8 — Monitor performance
Once traffic is flowing, use Statistics to follow clicks, conversions and revenue, broken down by Offer, Affiliate, country, device and more.
In the video, a test click and a conversion are followed through three screens:
Statistics, filtered by the Affiliate: the click, the conversion, the revenue, the Affiliate payout and your profit.
Tools → Advertiser Events: the conversion sent by the Advertiser, with its offer, affiliate, payouts and status (Processed).
Tools → Affiliate attributions: the conversion attributed to the Affiliate. Its details include the event log, with the postback sent to the Affiliate.
Note: A new conversion may show as Temporarily retained for a few minutes before it is processed.
Step 9 — Grow with the Affiliate Marketplace
The Affiliate Marketplace is where your affiliates find your offers on their own: they see the offers available to them, get their Tracking URLs, check payouts and set up their postbacks. To see it as one of your affiliates, use View as affiliate in Performance → Affiliates.
What's next?
Once your first campaign is running, explore these features:
Offer payout rules — different payouts by country, affiliate, platform or event type.
How to configure an Offer with several events — track several conversion events (for example, install and purchase) in the same Offer.
Macros — pass dynamic data through your Tracking URLs.
Smartlinks — route traffic across several Offers.
Need help? Reach out to your Aftrad account manager or contact our support team.