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What Customer Value actually does
A customer who spends $20 once and never comes back earns your partner exactly the same as a customer who spends $2,000 over a year. Most programs cannot tell those two apart, because they pay on the conversion and then stop looking.
Customer Value keeps looking. It follows the individual person your partner sent you, watches what that person does over the following days and weeks, and changes what the partner earns once that person proves what they are worth.
That is the whole idea. Everything below is how you set it up.
The three pieces
You need three things, and they only work in this order. Each one is useless without the one before it.
The part people skip
Pieces one and two are not built in Everflow. They arrive from your platform, on the conversion, every time. If they stop arriving, nothing breaks loudly.
What a rule decides
Every rule answers the same three questions, and a finished rule reads back as one sentence. Change any of the three and the sentence changes with it.
1. The goal · what has to be true
2. The cycle · over what stretch of time
3. The outcome · what the partner gets
Condition on the Behavior step, the cycle is Goal Cycle on the Timeframe step, and the outcome is Outcome Type back on Behavior.
Where those three land in the product
A saved rule shows you all three at once. The condition is written out as a plain sentence under the Behavior panel, which is the fastest way to check that a rule says what you meant it to say.
If that sentence does not match what you had in mind, fix the rule now. It is much cheaper than working out three weeks later why a partner was underpaid.
Bonus or substitution
The outcome comes in two shapes, and picking the wrong one is the most common setup mistake we see. The difference is one word: added, or instead.
One limit worth knowing before you choose
A bonus? is applied once per cycle. A substitution has no such limit and can apply to every qualifying conversion in the cycle.
That sounds like a reason to avoid bonuses for anything repeating. It is not, and the next section is why: the cycle itself can repeat.
Cycles, and rewards that repeat
The cycle is how often a customer's progress goes back to zero, and it is the biggest change in this version. You pick it on the Timeframe step.
Which one you want
Ask whether the thing you are rewarding is permanent or seasonal. Being a repeat customer is permanent, so that is Continuous. Depositing more than $500 this month is seasonal, so that is Recurring, and the partner can earn it again next month.
Paying a percentage of a number you send
The outcome does not have to be an amount you type. It can be a percentage, and the thing it is a percentage of can be one of your own data points.
Turn on Custom Payout, set the Payout Model to Percentage, then choose what the percentage applies to. There are two options.
Revenue behaves exactly the same way, through Custom Revenue and Revenue Model.
Shared or segmented
When more than one partner touches the same customer, you have to decide whose progress you are counting.
You set this on the first screen of the rule builder, and it is the one choice that changes who gets paid rather than how much.
Where this sits against your other payout settings
Customer Value wins. When a Customer Value rule applies to a conversion, it beats Custom Settings and it beats the offer's own payout.
Five ways people use it
These are the five shapes we see most often. Pick whichever is closest to your business, because each one has a full walkthrough of its own.
Common questions
QWhat happens if a data point does not arrive?
It reads as zero. If your platform forgets to send one, or sends it under a different name than the one you registered, nothing errors — the value is simply zero and the rule never fires. There is no alert for this, which is why it is worth testing with one real customer before switching a rule on across your whole account.
QWhere do I see what one individual customer did?
The Conversion Events report is the purpose-built view: one customer, every conversion, the data points that arrived on each, and which rule applied to them. The Flex Report can also break down by user in the network UI, which is the better route when you want per-customer figures sitting alongside your ordinary reporting dimensions. Offer and partner reports aggregate, so neither will show you a single person.
QDoes a Customer Value rule replace my offer's payout settings?
Only if you tell it to. A bonus is added on top of whatever the partner was already earning. A substitution replaces that payout for the conversions it applies to. Everything the rule does not match keeps paying exactly as your offer settings say.
QCan one customer trigger the same reward more than once?
A bonus is capped at once per cycle per customer. On a Continuous cycle, which never resets, that means once ever. On a Recurring cycle the customer can earn it again each time the cycle turns over. A substitution has no such limit.
QDo rules apply to conversions that already happened?
No. A rule starts looking at conversions from the moment it is saved. It will not reach back over history, so there is no way to retro-pay a partner for value a customer delivered before the rule existed.
→ How To Send User IDs & Data Points For Customer Value — the developer-facing setup, and how to prove the values arrived.
→ Build Your First Customer Value Rule — the simplest possible rule, and the best one to build first.
→ Paying On Net Gaming Revenue (NGR) With Customer Value — a monthly revenue share that carries a losing month forward.
→ Paying On Token & Credit Spend With Customer Value — the same machinery for an AI product, where the money arrives in token packs after the signup.
