Pay per click or lead (CPC & CPL)

Most Rekomi programs pay on a sale (the Per sale model, one-time or recurring). Two models pay earlier in the funnel: CPC pays per click, and CPL pays per qualified lead. This guide covers when to reach for each and how to set them up.

CPC and CPL are live. Select either model when creating a campaign (Starter plan and above); clicks and qualified leads are fraud-screened and awarded automatically as described below.

Every click and lead is fraud-scored before it can be paid. Leads are scored at the moment of submission; clicks are scored by a background job within about a minute of being recorded, always before the hourly awarding pass. Rekomi checks the real visitor's IP against IP reputation data (proxy, VPN, Tor, datacenter, and bot signals, plus a blended fraud score and recent-abuse history), holds anything high-risk out of payment for your review, and only ever pays traffic that clears. This up-front validation is the layer most affiliate tools skip, and it is what makes paying per click or lead safe. See Keeping CPC and CPL honest below.

Which one to use

CPC is rare for SaaS (clicks don't guarantee value) and best for paid content or syndication deals. CPL fits products with a free trial or demo, where a signup is worth a known amount to you. Both require a Starter plan or above.

CPC and CPL are invite-only. There is no public sign-up page for these campaigns and they are not listed in the creator network. You invite each partner and set their rate (per partner, or via a partner group), so paying per click or lead stays bounded by who you approve plus an optional campaign budget cap, not an open bounty anyone can claim. Auto-approve and public discoverability are turned off automatically for CPC/CPL.

Set up a CPC campaign

1. Create or edit a campaign and set the commission model to CPC. The type locks to Fixed (a click has no amount to take a percentage of). Set the value, for example $0.50 per click.
2. Affiliates share their neutral tracking link, rekomi.link/{their-slug}?p={campaign-id} (Rekomi generates it on their campaign page). A visitor who clicks it is counted on Rekomi's edge, then forwarded to your campaign's destination URL. Make sure the campaign's Website / link to promote is set; it is the page visitors land on after the click is counted, and the link will not resolve without it.
3. Clicks are scored for IP fraud (proxy, VPN, datacenter, bot) by a background job within about a minute of being recorded, de-duplicated per device, capped per IP, and aggregated into commissions hourly. Anything high-risk is held for review, never paid automatically. Affiliates see their click count and earnings on their campaign page.

Because the click is measured on Rekomi's side (not your server), neither you nor the affiliate can quietly change the number, which is what makes per-click payouts trustworthy.

Set up a CPL campaign

1. Set the commission model to CPL. The type locks to Fixed. Set the value, for example $10 per lead.
2. Affiliates share a Rekomi-hosted lead form, /lead/{their-slug}. A prospect who fills it in becomes a lead attributed to that affiliate.
3. Every submission must pass a Cloudflare Turnstile challenge, email-format and disposable-domain checks, and a self-lead guard before it earns. Duplicate submissions from the same person (including plus-aliases) are counted once.

A lead earns the moment a valid form is submitted, you do not wait for a sale. If a trial later converts, you can run a separate sale-based campaign alongside.

Rates, groups, budgets, and links

• Invite partners and set their rate. From the campaign, invite a partner and set their $ per click / $ per lead. The campaign's default rate is just a fallback; a partner's own rate always wins.
• Partner groups (rate tiers). On the Commissions tab, create groups (for example "Standard $0.30/click", "Premium $0.50/click") and assign partners to one from the partner's detail page. Rate precedence is per-partner override → group → performance tier → campaign default (performance tiers mostly matter for sale models; only fixed-amount tiers can apply to CPC and CPL). One group can be the default that new partners inherit.

• Budget cap. Set an optional campaign budget (CPC/CPL only). Once the campaign's commission reaches it, new clicks and leads stop earning. Live spent / remaining shows on the Commissions tab.
• Multiple destination links. Every campaign type except CPL supports extra deep links to specific products or pages on your own site, each tracked separately. On CPC campaigns these route through the neutral rekomi.link/{slug} domain, validated to your campaign's domain so the link can never be pointed at an arbitrary site; on sale-model campaigns they are direct links to the destination with the affiliate's own code.

Keeping CPC and CPL honest

Because these models pay without a purchase behind them, Rekomi validates every click and lead up front, before it can ever become a payout, rather than clawing money back later. This is the layer most affiliate tools skip, and it is why paying per click or lead on Rekomi is safe:

• IP fraud scoring before payment. Every lead is scored against IP reputation at the moment of submission, and every click within about a minute of being recorded: proxy, VPN, Tor, and datacenter detection, known-bot signals, recent-abuse history, and a blended fraud score. Anything the score flags as high-risk is held out of payment.
• A real, unspoofable visitor IP. Rekomi reads the true client IP at the edge in a way an affiliate cannot forge, which is what makes the next two controls reliable.
• Per-IP and per-affiliate limits, plus de-duplication. A single device or IP cannot earn unlimited clicks; repeat clicks from the same visitor collapse to one, each IP is capped at 100 payable clicks per day, and each affiliate is capped at 500 payable clicks (and 500 paid leads) per day by default, so no one partner can run up the budget in a day.
• Invalid-traffic quarantine you can review. Flagged clicks and leads are recorded and quarantined, never silently deleted. If something was a false positive, validate it from the Sales view and it becomes payable; if a Pending item looks wrong, you can invalidate it.
• Affiliate reputation. An affiliate whose traffic is consistently flagged as invalid is surfaced for review and can be auto-suspended, so a repeat offender is stopped, not just their individual clicks.
• Fail-closed by design. If a click's IP cannot be scored (for example the fraud service is briefly unreachable), it is held and retried for up to 3 days, then dropped, never paid. A lead that cannot be scored is rejected outright and not recorded. Money never moves on unverified traffic.
• Budgets, invite-only, and a payout hold. A campaign budget caps total spend, campaigns are invite-only, and CPC/CPL earnings sit in the standard payout grace window before any money moves, giving you time to review.

There are two places you review this. Each campaign has a Fraud tab that lists the clicks and leads Rekomi flagged and did not pay (high-risk IPs, bots, self-leads, disposable emails, and abusive affiliates); from there you can dismiss a false positive, mark it resolved, or ban a partner, which stops their future clicks and leads from earning immediately. Separately, a click or lead that was quarantined as invalid traffic shows an Invalidated status in the Sales view, where you can validate it to release it for payment, or invalidate a Pending item you judge fraudulent. CPC and CPL commissions are not refundable the way sales are, which is exactly why the checks happen before payment, not after.