Core Concepts & Glossary

Affiliate tracking has its own vocabulary. This page defines every term you’ll meet in the product and the rest of this wiki. Skim it once; come back when a word trips you up.

The five things everything revolves around

Concept	Plain-English meaning
Click	One visit to your tracking link. The atomic unit of traffic.
Conversion	A click that turned into something valuable — a sale, lead, install, or subscription.
Campaign	A tracking link plus the rules that decide where its visitors go.
Offer	The thing you’re promoting and what it pays (the payout).
Traffic Source	Where your visitors come from.

Full glossary

Click & traffic terms

Click — a recorded visit to a /t/<campaignId> link. Stores the visitor’s IP, country, city, device, OS, browser, referrer, UTM tags, ad-click IDs (gclid/fbclid/ttclid), and your sub-IDs.
Click ID (clickid) — the unique identifier Synaptyx assigns to each click. It is the thread that ties a click to its eventual conversion. It travels in the redirect URL and the X-Click-Id response header.
Sub-ID (sub1–sub30) — up to 30 free-form values you pass in the link (e.g. ?sub1=ad_creative_7&sub2=us_lookalike) to tag and later break down your traffic. Synaptyx stores all 30.
Traffic Source — the origin of a visitor, auto-classified into a category: paid, organic, social, ai (yes — ChatGPT & friends), referral, email, or direct.
Visitor ID (vid) — a stable per-visitor identifier used to stitch a visitor’s journey across clicks and pixel events.

Conversion & money terms

Conversion — a valuable action attributed to a click. Has a status (approved, pending, declined, hold…), a revenue amount, and an event type.
Payout — what you earn per conversion on a CPA offer.
Revenue — what the sale was worth. For your own Stripe/Polar store this is the real order total.
CPA / CPL / RevShare — payout models: Cost Per Action (a sale), Cost Per Lead (a signup), or Revenue Share (a % of the sale). An offer’s payoutType can also be Multi for multiple goals.
Postback — a server-to-server callback. A CPA network calls your conversion URL to report a sale; you call your traffic source’s postback URL to report it onward. No browser involved — it’s machine-to-machine.
Attribution — the act of connecting a conversion back to the click (and therefore the ad, creative, geo…) that caused it.
EPC — Earnings Per Click (revenue ÷ clicks). The headline profitability metric.
CR — Conversion Rate (conversions ÷ clicks).
ROI / ROAS — return on investment / return on ad spend (revenue vs. cost).

Campaign & routing terms

Campaign — owns a tracking link and a flow. CRUD’d in the Visual Builder.
Flow — the semantic routing config (a JSON decision tree) that the engine evaluates on every click to decide the destination. See Flow Engine.
Graph — the visual representation of the flow (nodes, edges, positions) you edit on the canvas. The flow is compiled from the graph.
Node — a block on the builder canvas (a rule, a split, an offer…). Each node type does one job.
Landing Page — an intermediate page (an advertorial, a pre-sell) shown before the offer.
Smart Rotator — an AI node that auto-allocates traffic to your best-earning option using a multi-armed bandit.
Macro / Token — a {placeholder} like `{clickid}` or `{country}` that Synaptyx replaces with the real value when building destination URLs. See the macro reference.

Quality & fraud terms

Bot filter — a hard gate that drops obviously non-human traffic (crawlers, curl, headless browsers, your blocklists). Dropped clicks are not recorded.
Fraud score — a 0–100 score on every recorded click, combining datacenter IP, Tor, click velocity, suspicious user-agent, and geo-mismatch signals. It flags suspicious traffic but never silently drops it.
Pixel — a small JavaScript snippet you place on your landing/thank-you page. It fires events (page view, add-to-cart, custom) back to Synaptyx and enriches the click with extra browser signals.

Platform & access terms

Tenant — a workspace boundary. The platform itself is the default tenant; white-label resellers each get their own tenant with custom branding and plans.
Team — collaborators inside one workspace, with per-resource read / write / none permissions.
Sub-affiliate — someone you pay a commission to for traffic they bring. They log into a separate, data-masked partner portal.
API key — a syx_live_… secret used for the REST API and MCP. Scope-limited and shown only once.
MCP — the Model Context Protocol, the standard that lets AI assistants call Synaptyx as a set of tools. See MCP & AI Agents.
SLA — Service Level Agreement, the uptime promise. Explained in Reliability & SLA.

How the concepts connect

A typical lifecycle, end to end:

A visitor clicks your campaign link from a traffic source → Synaptyx records a click, filters bots, and scores fraud → the flow routes them (by geo/device/test) to a landing page or offer → they convert → a postback or revenue webhook creates a conversion, attributed to the original click via its click ID → you see EPC/CR/ROI in analytics and can pay a sub-affiliate their commission.

Next, see exactly how the system carries that out:

How It All Works (architecture)The Tracking Lifecycle (step by step)