An event is the smallest unit an offer can pay on. Rather than treating a whole offer as one all-or-nothing conversion, rewarded advertising breaks it into a sequence of steps, each of which can credit the user and pay the publisher on its own.

How it works

An advertiser defines the milestones worth paying for: install the app, finish the tutorial, reach level ten, make a purchase. Each milestone becomes an event with its own reward and its own payout. When the user reaches one, a postback fires for that event specifically, and the reward for that step is issued without waiting for the rest.

The offer's advertised total reward is simply the sum of its events. A user who completes the first two steps of a four-step offer earns the first two rewards and nothing more.

Why offers are built this way

• Advertisers pay for depth, not volume. An install that never opens again is worth little, and event-based pricing stops the advertiser paying full price for it.

• Users get paid sooner. A reward at step one keeps someone engaged through a journey that might take days to finish.

• Drop-off becomes visible. Where users stop is measurable per step, which tells the advertiser which part of their funnel is broken.

• Risk is spread. A partial completion still produces value on both sides instead of nothing.

Events and sequencing

Some offers allow their events in any order; others require them in strict sequence, which is what sequential tasks describes. Not every event pays, either. A non-crediting event fires for tracking purposes but awards nothing, and showing one to a user as though it were a reward is a reliable way to generate complaints.

Events and postbacks

Each rewarded event fires its own postback, which is what lets a publisher credit a user mid-journey rather than at the end. It also means a single offer can generate several postbacks over days, and an integration that assumes one conversion per click will silently drop the later ones. Handling events individually, keyed to the identifier that distinguishes them, is what makes multi-step offers work at all.

Reading event structure before you display an offer

The step list is the offer's real description. Two offers with the same headline reward can ask completely different things: one a single purchase, the other five stages ending in a subscription. Presenting only the total without the steps sets users up to start something they will not finish, which costs a completion and some goodwill.

Common misconceptions

• An event is not the same as a conversion. One offer can produce several conversions, one per rewarded event.

• Events are not always sequential. Order is a property of the offer, not of the format.

• Not every event pays the user. Tracking-only steps exist and should never be shown as rewards.