Set the cap. Sleep at night.
Running paid traffic without a budget cap is risky. So is running an affiliate program — when a top affiliate goes hard, you can rack up commissions fast. Merkle Tree Affiliates gives you per-campaign budget controls so you decide exactly how much each campaign can spend, in any window.
Three ceilings, fully independent
For every campaign, you can set any combination of:
- Daily ceiling — resets at 00:00 UTC.
- Weekly ceiling — rolling 7-day window ending today.
- Monthly ceiling — current calendar month, UTC.
Leave any field blank to skip that ceiling. Most teams set just a daily + monthly cap and call it a day.
What counts as "spend"
We count the commission on conversions that are pending, approved, or paid in the window. We do not count:
- Rejected conversions (e.g. fraud)
- Refunded conversions (after a chargeback)
So if a top affiliate sends 10 conversions worth $500 each in commission today but you reject 2 as fraud, your daily spend shows $4,000 — not $5,000.
Auto-pause when a cap is hit
Auto-pause is on by default. When any of your three ceilings is reached or crossed, the campaign:
- Switches to paused status — no new conversions count.
- Sends you a notification with the exact reason ("daily_budget_reached", "weekly_budget_reached", or "monthly_budget_reached").
- Logs an entry in the audit trail so your team can see exactly when and why.
When you're ready to keep going — raise the ceiling or wait for the window to reset — hit Resume and the campaign is live again instantly.
The pacing visualization
Inside the portal, every budget gets a live progress bar:
- 🟢 Green when you're below the warning threshold.
- 🟡 Amber at 80% (configurable from 50 – 100%) — "approaching cap".
- 🔴 Red when the cap is reached.
You also get a daily projection: based on how fast your campaign is burning so far today, here's where it'll land by end of day. If the projection crosses your daily cap, we surface an amber warning before you actually hit the cap.
A worked example
You set a $500 daily + $10,000 monthly ceiling on your "Vortex Finance Sign-up Bonus" campaign. The affiliate commission is $20 per conversion.
- At 25 conversions today ($500 commission), the daily cap is reached → auto-pause kicks in.
- You raise the daily cap to $800 → campaign resumes instantly.
- At 500 conversions this month ($10,000 commission), the monthly cap is reached → auto-pause kicks in. Campaign stays paused until the next calendar month or you raise the cap.
Throughout, you can see the live pacing on the Performance Hub and on the campaigns list (every row has a small wallet icon → deep-link to the Budget page).
Why this matters
You get predictable spend with zero overdraft risk. Your wallet can't go negative — but more importantly, you don't lose a night's sleep when a top affiliate decides to push hard at 2 a.m.
Related reading
New in 2026: budget carryover
Real-world campaigns don't spend evenly day to day. Sometimes you have a slow Sunday and a busy Monday. We now let unspent daily-budget headroom roll forward into the next day's effective ceiling — capped by sensible platform-wide limits — so a slow day doesn't cost you Monday's momentum.
A few things to know:
- It's on by default, but you can opt-out per campaign if you want a hard cap every day no matter what.
- There are caps. Platform admins can set the maximum percentage that can roll forward and the maximum number of consecutive days carryover can accumulate. You won't ever end up with a runaway ceiling.
- The auto-pause logic still applies. If your effective ceiling is reached (base budget + carry-in), the campaign auto-pauses just like before.
You don't have to do anything to opt in. If you'd prefer the old behavior, flip the carryover switch off on the campaign's Budget page.
New in 2026: real-time budget alerts
You can now get a real-time notification the moment a campaign hits a budget threshold or auto-pauses — in-app, email, Slack, or batched into the weekly digest, your call. Set it up once on the new Notifications & Alerts page in the advertiser portal.