Tech & Tracking
Affiliate Sub-ID
A sub-ID specifically used to tag and report on affiliate campaign segments.
An Affiliate Sub-ID is a sub-ID used specifically to tag and report on affiliate campaign segments, letting a network or advertiser identify which affiliate, sub-affiliate or campaign slice drove a given conversion. It functions like a standard SubID but lives on the network side of the relationship, giving both parties a shared reference for reconciling traffic quality and payouts.
Buyers running under an affiliate network use these IDs to prove which segments deserve payout and to spot where the network's numbers diverge from their own tracker. The friction point is mismatched sub-ID mapping between your tracker and the network's reporting — if the values don't line up, disputed conversions become impossible to reconcile, so agree on the sub-ID convention up front.
In buyer speech
“Send the network your affiliate sub-ID breakdown so we can reconcile the FTD count they're disputing for last week.”