Three words come up constantly in PalDock, and everything else makes more sense once they are clear.
- A conversion is something that happened.
- A commission is a rule about what it is worth.
- A transaction is the money that came out of it.
Conversion
A conversion is a recorded event with no money attached. It reaches PalDock in one of two ways:
- Created by PalDock: clicks, leads, and sends. These happen because somebody clicked a link or submitted a form.
- Received through tracking: prospects, sales, and any custom type you define. These are reported by the advertiser, through a pixel, a postback, the Tracking API, or a manual import.
On its own a conversion is a performance metric. It appears in reports, it counts towards your click and lead numbers, and it pays nobody. See Conversion type.
Commission
A commission is the rule that turns a conversion into a payout. It decides:
- Which conversions it applies to, by offer, advertiser, conversion type, source, and channel.
- How much is paid, to your partner and by your advertiser.
- What kind of transaction is created. See Transaction type.
Without a matching commission, nothing is paid. The conversion is still recorded, it simply produces no transaction. See How PalDock picks a commission.
Transaction
A transaction is a conversion with a payout and a result: pending, approved, or rejected.
It has two sides, what you pay the affiliate and what the advertiser pays you, and they are synchronised. Approving one approves the other, so the two can never disagree.
How it fits together
A visitor clicks an affiliate link, which creates a click. They fill in a form, which creates a lead. Days later the advertiser confirms the order, which creates a sale. Three conversions, one journey.
Your commission says a sale on this offer is worth 40 to the affiliate and 55 from the advertiser, so the sale produces a transaction. The click and the lead stay as they are, counted in reports and paid for by nobody, unless you have commissions for them too.
When there is no transaction
A conversion exists but no payout appeared. The usual reasons:
- No commission matches that conversion type.
- The commission is inactive or outside its active period.
- The recurrence limit was reached.
- The conversion was deduplicated on the advertiser’s external ID.
The conversion log tells you which one it was. See Tracking and Conversion Logs.
