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Conversion

A conversion is a completed purchase that traces back to a click on one of your perks or rewards — it's how you measure what a perk actually earned, not just how many people looked at it.

When a customer clicks a perk on your page, they land on the merchant's site and may go on to buy something. If they do, that purchase is reported back to Paylode and recorded as a conversion tied to the original click. A view tells you a perk got attention; a click tells you it got interest; a conversion tells you it drove a sale. Conversions are the events your earnings and your performance reports are built on.

The one thing to understand up front is timing: a conversion never appears the instant a customer buys. It shows up later, after the sale has been reported and processed — and its status can keep changing for weeks after that. That lag is normal, and this page explains why so the numbers don't surprise you.

How it works​

A conversion moves through a few stages before it's final:

  1. Click. A customer clicks a perk. Paylode records the click and issues a tracking identifier that follows the customer to the merchant. If tracking ever hiccups, the customer is still redirected — the click-through always returns a redirect, so a tracking problem never blocks the customer from reaching the offer.
  2. Purchase. The customer buys on the merchant's site. Nothing reaches Paylode yet — the purchase lives on the merchant's side first.
  3. Report back. The sale is reported back through the network that tracks it. This step is not instant; it typically takes hours to a few days, and the exact delay is outside Paylode's control.
  4. Ingest. Paylode takes in reported conversions on a regular schedule rather than continuously, so a reported sale becomes visible on the next cycle, not the moment it's reported.
  5. Settle. Once visible, a conversion carries a status that can still change as the merchant confirms or rejects the sale (for returns, fraud checks, and the like).

Why the number keeps moving​

Two effects combine, and both are expected:

  • The reporting lag between a purchase and its report back. There's no fixed service level on how quickly a merchant reports a sale — treat same-day visibility as best-effort, not guaranteed.
  • The attribution window. A purchase can be attributed to a click that happened a while ago. That window stays open for a stretch of time — often weeks to a few months — and it varies by source, so there's no single flat number to quote. In practice this means conversions can keep arriving for a given campaign well after the click activity has died down.

Because of this, today's totals for the current period are provisional and firm up over subsequent refresh cycles. See Data freshness for what "recent" means for your reports.

Statuses​

A conversion reports one of four statuses:

StatusMeaning
PENDINGReported and recorded, not yet finalized — may still change.
LOCKEDFinalized and confirmed; won't change further.
REJECTEDReversed by the merchant (e.g. a return or a failed check).
UNKNOWNNo definitive status is available yet.

A conversion commonly starts PENDING and later becomes LOCKED or REJECTED. Build any reconciliation logic to expect a status to change over time rather than treating first sight as final.

Where conversions show up​

Conversions are read through the Analytics surface, not written by you. The current path is to query them over your analytics data, scoped automatically to your own account — see Query your metrics. Each conversion carries the identifiers you need to tie it back to your own systems: the click it came from, the transaction amount, the product it happened on (a perk page or a Boost journey), and any custom attributes you tagged onto the original link.

A single conversion record, trimmed to the client-facing fields, looks like this:

{
  "activityId": "9c5e16b5-932a-4fab-a59b-edacd933e0d0",
  "timestamp": "2026-06-14T13:45:30Z",
  "data": {
    "status": "PENDING",
    "clickId": "6f1d2a80-4c7e-4f2a-bb90-2a1c0e5d7f34",
    "transactionAmount": 84.50,
    "attribution": [
      { "key": "user_id", "value": "42931" },
      { "key": "utm_source", "value": "dashboard" }
    ],
    "product": { "type": "PERK_COLLECTIONS" }
  }
}