Caps & Time
Day-based caps are counted for the 24-hour day based on your platform's time zone. Those caps reset at 12:00 am each day. Month-based caps are counted for the calendar month and reset on the first day of each month. For lifetime caps, all conversions, payouts, or revenues are counted regardless of time.
When a Cap is Reached: Redirects
When an offer’s cap is reached, traffic for that offer redirects to another specified offer. Here’s how TUNE determines which offer to redirect to, stopping at the first valid step:
- If the offer has an entry for its Redirect Offer setting, the user is redirected to that offer.
- If the offer is in an offer group, the offer group’s settings take over.
- If your platform has an entry for Default Redirect URL, the user is redirected to that URL.
- If none are valid, the user is redirected to a white page.
This redirect happens once the system detects that any of that offer’s cap is reached. For example, a publisher has a daily cap of 50 conversions and a monthly cap of 500 conversions for a given offer. If that publisher exceeds 50 conversions in a single day, the offer redirects until the following day when that daily cap resets. If that publisher exceeds 500 conversions in the month, the offer then redirects until the first day of the following month.
Note: When an offer with goals enabled has a conversion cap, only conversions on the default goal count toward the cap.
Potential Delays on Triggering Caps
Because TUNE is built to process thousands of conversions per second, conversion data is collected and applied to our caps-monitoring system in short batches rather than in real-time. What does this mean for you and your offers? It means you might occasionally experience a short delay of up to 5 minutes between when a cap hits and when an offer starts to redirect.
This is a rare occurrence, but it can happen, so it’s good for platform owners to be aware of this potential limitation. There are two main reasons this might happen:
- A user clicks on the offer while it’s active and converts on it simultaneously when the offer cap is reached.
- There’s a sudden spike in traffic.
Using the example above, your publisher has a daily cap of 50 conversions. They’re at 48 conversions for the day, and they get a small surge of traffic, resulting in 3 more conversions within the same minute. Because the offer cap hasn’t taken effect yet, all three conversions are recorded.
While this doesn’t happen often, if this occurrence concerns you, you may want to reduce your cap by 10% to account for a potential overage.
In rare cases of significantly high traffic volume, you may experience delays of up to 15 minutes.