Promotion tool

Creatopy banners for a Maxlead offer

Creatopy is a banner design product, formerly associated with display banners: the artwork, the sizes, and the file a display placement will accept. It is not a CPA network, it does not pay a conversion, and it does not replace the offer rules. Maxlead does not own Creatopy. Creatopy does not own Maxlead. You connect the two by putting a Maxlead tracking link on the banner as the click destination, and by giving every new banner its own sub ID so the report can tell the designs apart.

Maxlead is a CPA performance network that has operated since 2015. After the publisher account is approved, public offers are available from the desk. Other offers stay closed until you apply and an admin approves the request. The tracking link is issued on the offer and already carries your publisher id. You may pass s1 through s8 for the source, the campaign, the creative, and the placement. Those values come back on the conversion report and the performance report. A global postback covers the account. An offer postback covers one campaign. The dashboard shows clicks, conversions, earnings, EPC, and CVR. Approved earnings are paid every week. Pending and rejected conversions are not paid as if they were approved.

A banner tool cannot do any of that work. It can help you draw a rectangle that a display placement will accept. The campaign still lives on Maxlead: the offer you are allowed to run, the link that records the click, and the payout that follows an approved conversion only.

What Creatopy is for

Display networks and some native placements ask for a finished image or an HTML banner in a fixed size. If the advertiser already uploaded creatives on the Maxlead offer, start there. Those files were made for that campaign, and they are less likely to invent a claim the advertiser will later reject. Creatopy enters the workflow when the offer has no creative, when the supplied file is the wrong size, or when you need a simple variation you can label and test.

Treat the product as a drawing board, not as a traffic source and not as a tracker. You design inside it, you export a file or publish a banner the display network can call, and you leave. The visitor who clicks never needs a Creatopy account. They need to land on the click path that Maxlead issued for your publisher id. If the banner looks finished and the link is wrong, the design work was wasted. The click either misses your account or it hits the advertiser page directly, which means Maxlead never recorded it and a later conversion cannot be tied to you.

Sizes ad networks ask for

There is no single size that every network accepts, and this page will not pretend there is a universal kit. The practical habit is to read the placement spec before you design, then build only the sizes that spec names. Common display requests, the ones media buyers see again and again, include a medium rectangle at 300 by 250, a leaderboard at 728 by 90, a wide skyscraper at 160 by 600, a half page at 300 by 600, a mobile banner at 320 by 50, a larger mobile banner at 320 by 100, and a billboard at 970 by 250. Some networks add a square, a portrait, or a size that only their inventory uses. If their sheet lists a size, that sheet wins. If it does not list a size, do not invent a file and hope the upload form stretches it.

Build the same offer message across the sizes you actually need, and keep the message short enough to remain readable when the unit is small. A 320 by 50 banner cannot carry a paragraph. It can carry a plain product name and the action the offer asks for, if that action is short. A half page can carry a little more, and it still should not become a landing page. The landing page, when the offer uses one, is a separate step. The banner’s only job is to earn a click that the tracking link can count. Label the file with the size and a short creative name you will reuse as the sub ID, so the asset folder and the Maxlead report use the same words.

Honest claims

The banner is an ad for the offer, not a place to invent a better offer. Read the campaign before you write a word of copy. Note the action that counts, the countries, the sources that are allowed, and any wording the advertiser restricted. If the offer is a lead form, the banner may say that a person can request information or complete a form, using whatever phrasing the offer itself uses. It may not say the visitor is already approved, already a winner, or already owed a payout. If the offer pays you, the publisher, on an approved conversion, that fact is not a promise you can print for the visitor. Your commission is not their prize.

Honest claims stay inside what the advertiser is willing to stand behind. Do not add medical results, income results, or “guaranteed” language because a small banner feels empty. Do not paste another company’s logo, a celebrity face, or a fake interface that looks like a bank alert or a government notice. Those tricks sometimes pass a casual glance in a design tool and then fail the traffic source, the advertiser, or both. A rejection on the conversion is the expensive version of the same mistake: the click happened, the lead was thrown out, and the weekly payout does not include it.

If the offer ships approved wording, use that wording and stop. If it does not, write the smallest true sentence: who the product is for, in which country if the design is country-specific, and what the person does next. Keep the visual in the same tone. A screaming “last chance” sticker on a calm finance form teaches the wrong expectation, and the advertiser’s review queue is where that expectation gets corrected. When you are unsure, ask the account manager on Maxlead before you upload the file. One sentence of guidance is worth more than a folder of clever banners you are not allowed to run. Creatopy will render whatever sentence you type. It will not check that sentence against the campaign.

The click destination is the Maxlead tracking link

Every banner needs one click-through, and that click-through is the tracking link from the offer you are approved to run on Maxlead. The link already includes your publisher id. You add the sub IDs for this banner. You do not paste the advertiser’s naked page, the preview URL, or a Creatopy share link that only shows the design to a colleague. The preview on Maxlead is for reading the page. Traffic goes through the tracking link so the click id exists before the visitor reaches the advertiser. Some networks host the image and ask for a separate click URL. Paste the tracking link there. Some HTML banners carry the destination inside the file. That destination has to be the same tracking link, including the sub IDs for that creative. If you duplicate a campaign, confirm the URL did not reset to a sample page or to the previous offer.

Test the path before you spend. Click the banner from a device in a country the offer accepts, or use the network’s preview if it performs a real click. You should pass through the Maxlead link and arrive on the advertiser page. In Activity you should see the click, the publisher id on your account, and the sub IDs you attached. If you do not see the click, stop. Fix the URL. A beautiful file that never hits the tracker cannot earn, and it cannot teach you which size worked. The visitor who clicked a specific banner should meet the offer that banner described. If you use a bridge page, that page still has to be allowed, and the button on it still has to use the tracking link.

A new sub ID for every banner

The point of s1 through s8 is that you can name the traffic yourself and read the names later. Pick a scheme and keep it. A workable set for display is s1 for the traffic source, s2 for the campaign, s3 for the creative, and s4 for the size or placement. Leave s5 through s8 free for a country label, a date, or a test you did not expect. The names should be short and stable. disp-network-a, spring-finance, headline-plain, and 300x250 are enough. A paragraph stuffed into a sub ID is harder to read on the report and easier to break when a tracker truncates it.

Give a new sub ID to every banner that is actually different. A new headline is a new creative, so it gets a new s3. A new size of the same headline can keep the creative name and change s4, if you want to compare sizes, or it can get its own s3 if you would rather read each file as its own row. What you must not do is reuse yesterday’s sub ID on a banner you redesigned this morning. The report will add the new clicks to the old clicks, and you will not know which design produced the approved conversions.

Change the sub ID when you change the claim, the image, the language, or the offer. Do not change it for a tiny export setting that the visitor cannot see, or you will split one result across two rows and convince yourself the test failed. Write the map down in the same note as the tracking link: which slot means source, which slot means banner, which file on disk matches which value. The publisher id stays the publisher id. You do not invent a second publisher id inside Creatopy to organize banners. Organization is the sub IDs. If you overwrite the publisher id, the click is no longer yours.

How the test is read

Upload only the sizes you can afford to watch. Send a small test. Then read Maxlead, not the design tool. Clicks tell you the banner was served and clicked. Conversions tell you the offer recorded an action. Earnings are the approved payout, at the rate written on the offer. CVR is approved conversions divided by clicks. EPC is earnings per click. Both numbers describe your traffic on that link. They are not a grade Creatopy stores, and they are not a promise that the next hundred clicks will match the first hundred.

Use the performance report to group by the sub IDs. Keep the banner that produced an approved conversion you can explain, and pause the banner that produced only clicks. A high click count with no approvals is not a creative win. It can mean the claim pulled the wrong person, the country was off, the offer cap was already full, or the action was harder than the banner made it look. Fix one of those, and give the revision a new sub ID so the next window stays clean. If you lumped every placement into one sub ID, you cannot turn a bad placement off without turning a better one off with it.

The weekly payout includes approved earnings only. A conversion that is still pending is not cash. A conversion that was rejected is not cash. Do not raise the display budget because a pending number looked large on a Tuesday. Wait until the status is one you can reconcile, then compare that approved earnings figure with what you spent at the traffic source. Maxlead does not see your media invoice. You have to put the two numbers next to each other yourself.

Postback, tracker, and the design tool

Creatopy does not receive a conversion postback. If you run a tracker in front of the offer, the usual path is still the one the guide describes for any campaign. The click id you care about is created when the visitor opens the Maxlead tracking link. Your tracker can pass its own click id into one of the sub ID slots, and a postback from Maxlead can send that value back when the conversion is approved or rejected. A pending conversion does not fire the postback. Tokens you can place include the click id, the payout, the status, the offer, and sub1 through sub8, which are the values you passed as s1 through s8.

Set the global postback if every offer should report to the same tracker URL. Set an offer postback if this display campaign needs a different URL. Do not point the postback at Creatopy. There is nothing there for a conversion to update. Point it at the tracker that is supposed to mark the click. If s3 is headline-plain, the exported file name should say that too, so an approved or rejected postback points at a banner you can recognize.

Mistakes that waste the file

The usual failures are simple. The banner clicks through to the advertiser preview instead of the tracking link. The publisher id was stripped when someone “cleaned up” the URL. Two designs share one sub ID. The claim is sharper than the offer. The size was guessed instead of read from the placement. The animation is heavier than the network allows, so the ad never serves, while the report on Maxlead stays empty and looks like a conversion problem. The campaign was duplicated and still carries last month’s offer link.

Another failure is treating the design tool as proof the campaign is compliant. A file that exports cleanly can still violate the offer or the traffic source. This page is not legal advice. You remain responsible for the claim in the banner and for the source you buy. If the offer forbids display, do not buy display and hope the artwork is approved anyway. Do not put a fake comment, a personal earnings screenshot, or a countdown that is not real on the creative. Those are claims, and a fabricated testimonial will not become an approved conversion.

A practical order of work

Open the offer on Maxlead and confirm you are allowed to run it, in the country you can reach, on display if display is the source. Read the action and the restricted wording. If a creative is already attached, use it. If you need a size that is missing, build that size in Creatopy with a sentence the offer can support. Export only the sizes the network listed. Set s1 to the source, s2 to the campaign, s3 to the banner name, and s4 to the size. Paste the full tracking link as the click destination. Click it once and find the click on your account.

Run a small test. Read clicks, approved conversions, earnings, EPC, and CVR. Pause the weak sub ID. Keep the one that produced an approval you trust. Talk to the account manager before you request a stack of extra offers to match banners you already drew. One campaign that fits the traffic is worth more than a gallery of files pointed at links you are not approved to use. When the week closes, the payout run pays the approved earnings, not the pending pile and not the rejected pile. Creatopy will still be there when you need the next size. It will not send the payout, and it should not be where the click ends.