Set conditional caps on a buyer

This article shows how to cap only part of a buyer's traffic, for example "200 leads a day overall, but at most 50 from CA". A buyer's normal caps say how many leads it takes. Conditional caps say how many of which leads.

How conditional caps work

A conditional cap is a rule with a name, conditions and limits. It counts only the leads that match its conditions.

How they behave:

• They sit beneath the buyer's own caps. A lead must have room under the buyer's normal caps and under every conditional cap it matches.
• Every matching cap applies. Unlike routing, where the first match wins, a lead that matches three conditional caps needs room in all three, and a sale counts against all three. Their order in the list does not matter.
• Same windows and timezone as the buyer. A conditional cap's day is the buyer's day.
• Only sales count. A sale counts against the caps it matched, at the sale price, the same way the buyer's own caps are charged. A ping on its own does not count, and test buyer runs never count.
• Undoing a sale gives the usage back. A return, a re-accept, or a CPA decline, expiry or price confirmation adjusts the conditional caps along with the buyer's own caps.
• Conditions are checked during distribution, after your integrations have run, so a cap can count on a value an integration added to the lead.
• Every distribution strategy respects them: Waterfall, Weighted, Advanced and Highest Bidder.
• A buyer can have up to 50 conditional caps.

Prerequisites

• A buyer attached to the campaign
• The condition you want to cap, and its limit, agreed with the buyer

Add a conditional cap

1. Go to Campaigns and open the campaign.
2. Open the Buyers tab and click the buyer.
3. On Configuration, scroll to the Conditional Caps card, below the buyer's normal caps.
4. Click Add conditional cap.
5. Enter a Name, for example "CA daily".
6. Under Applies to leads matching, add the conditions, for example state equals CA.
7. Fill in the limits you need, such as Daily Cap 50. Leave the other windows empty.
8. Leave Active switched on.
9. Click Save.

To stop using a cap, switch Active off or click Remove.

Check usage

Open the buyer's Overview tab. The Conditional caps section shows live usage for each cap, next to the buyer's own cap usage.

Expected result

Leads that match the cap are sold to the buyer until the limit is reached, and then the buyer is skipped for matching leads while other leads keep flowing. On the lead timeline, a skipped buyer shows Conditional cap reached, naming the cap and the window that filled, for example "CA daily, day 50/50".

Editing a cap

• Renaming a cap or changing its limits keeps the usage already counted.
• Changing what a cap tests, for example from state equals CA to state equals TX, starts it again at zero, because the old count no longer describes the same leads.
• Cloning a buyer copies its conditional caps.

Troubleshooting

• A buyer stopped taking leads from one state but takes others. A conditional cap for that state is full. Check its usage on the buyer's Overview tab.
• The lead says the buyer's cap was reached, not the conditional cap. When the buyer's own cap is also full, that one is named first, so you raise the right limit first.
• A lead was skipped although it matched only one cap with room. It probably matched another active cap that is full. Every matching cap must have room.
• Usage reset after an edit. You changed the cap's conditions. Only name and limit changes keep usage.
• Leads that should match are not counted. Check the field and value in the conditions against a real lead, and confirm the cap is Active.