Pre-launch QA checklist for affiliate offers: 14 checks before you scale

Why pre-launch QA matters more than post-launch fixes

An offer that launches broken costs more than the lost conversions. You pay out on conversions you cannot prove, affiliates pull traffic the moment payouts stop matching their numbers, and the goodwill takes weeks to repair. The fix is boring: run the same 14 checks every time, before a single real click is bought.

I run this list on every advertiser engagement. Half the items will pass on the first try. The other half catch something — a missing macro, a wrong event, a misconfigured cap. The point is that you find them before your affiliates do.

Tracking integrity (checks 1–5)

• 1. Click ID propagates from the network tracking link through every page of the funnel — landing, order form, upsell, thank-you. Open dev tools and confirm the value survives every redirect.
• 2. The click ID is written to the CRM order record under the correct custom field. Open a test order in the admin and look at the field directly — do not trust the order confirmation email.
• 3. The outbound postback URL contains every macro the network expects: transaction_id, amount, currency, and any sub IDs your campaign passes. A postback that fires with empty parameters is accepted and silently logged as a $0 conversion.
• 4. The postback fires on the terminal order status (approved, captured, shipped) — never on created or pending. Trigger a payment decline in the sandbox and confirm no postback goes out.
• 5. The network logs the inbound postback within seconds and reports the conversion under the correct affiliate, with the correct payout. Check the affiliate's own report view, not just the advertiser dashboard.

Payout and economics (checks 6–9)

• 6. The offer payout matches the contract for every payout tier (front-end, upsell, rebill). Run one test conversion per tier and verify the network shows the agreed amount.
• 7. Currency is set correctly on both the offer and the postback. A USD offer firing with a EUR amount accepts the number but reports the wrong revenue.
• 8. The cap and daily budget are configured. An uncapped offer with a payout error is a four-figure mistake. Set a soft cap at 2x your expected daily volume for the first week.
• 9. The conversion window matches the affiliate agreement. A 30-day window on a 7-day offer will pay out long after the affiliate's traffic stopped converting.

Fraud and quality (checks 10–12)

• 10. Duplicate transaction ID rejection is on at the network. Without it, an affiliate can replay one approved postback and rack up free conversions.
• 11. IP and geo rules match the offer's allowed regions. A US-only offer with no geo filter will pay out on global traffic and you will only notice on the next chargeback report.
• 12. Fraud thresholds are configured in the CRM: max orders per IP per hour, BIN blocklist, velocity rules. If you do not set these, the first scaled push will pull in everything.

Operations and visibility (checks 13–14)

• 13. Reporting roll-up works: conversions in the CRM, the network, and any BI tool reconcile to within 1% for a 24-hour window. If they do not match, you have a data leak somewhere in the chain and you will be debugging blind later.
• 14. The on-call rotation and incident playbook are documented and shared with the affiliate manager. When a postback breaks at 2am Saturday, someone has to know to look — and where to look first.

How long the full checklist takes

On a clean offer with one network and one CRM, the full 14 checks take 2–3 hours including test conversions. On a complex offer (multiple networks, upsells, subscription rebills, multiple geos), plan a full day. Every check has a clear pass/fail — there is no judgement call.

Save the completed checklist as a launch artifact. When something breaks three months in, the first question is always what changed since launch — and the only useful answer is a documented baseline.

Where to go deeper

For Everflow-specific postback debugging, the 9-step diagnosis checklist walks through the failure modes I see most often. For Konnektive setup, the full pixel + postback walkthrough covers the configuration this QA assumes is in place. If you would rather have someone run all 14 checks for your next launch, that is the readiness call.