The Affiliate Link software automates the affiliate sign-up procedure,
providing affiliates with a special link to your site so they would be
credited for referring visitors to your site, purchasing your goods online,
referring new affiliates and so on. In addition, Affiliate Link supports
3-tier affiliate programs where affiliates are credited not only for
visitors they refer, but also for visitors referred by affiliates who,
in turn, were referred by that affiliate.
Here is a basic illustration of how Affiliate link most commonly handles
sales and clickthrough tracking:
A visitor must "click through" an
affiliate's link, which is assigned to them by the software, in
order for the tracking process to begin. After this has occured
our software, , places
a cookie on the visitor's browser; this is what we use to determine
which affiliate's link, if any, a visitor has followed to get to your site.
It's almost always best if logging does not come
into the picture until an order has been confirmed;
however, if this is not possible, you can also either
decide on the status of
the order at the time a sale takes place, and/or choose
to log only orders which send a
special parameter to .
(This is explained in more detail below.)
Order logging is handled by . Basically, looks for the cookie placed by , and if it finds
that the visitor has indeed been referred by an affiliate, records the sale amount, and
calculates the affiliate's due commission.
From this point, you may either:
Display a receipt, or "thank you" page to your customer, in which case
will be embedded in the HTML as a 1x1 transparent image, invisible
and harmless to your page's layout.
Or you may choose to redirect the visitor to a page, site or
script of your choosing, using the redirect
parameter.
How exactly the logging is handled depends on how it's called.
Click here for a far more detailed explanation.
Make a clear description of requirements your affiliate must satisfy.
Optionally, provide an agreement your affiliate candidates should read
and understand before proceeding to sign up procedure. (You should have some
example templates of this in the file 'quickstart.pdf which you received after
your account was created and/or integrated.)
Add a link to automatic affiliate sign-up page at
http://
Let affiliates sign up themselves using this page.
After sign up form is submitted, affiliate will receive email notification
and see confirmation page.
If the Require Signups Confirmation option is enabled, the software will send a special e-mail to each affiliate candidate and require them to confirm their signup by clicking a link in that e-mail. Otherwise, the software will always process signups directly.
If Defer Signups option is enabled,
affiliate candidate will see notification page with unique request ID#
and receive email notification with request ID# and statement like "Your
request will be carefully reviewed". To create affiliate accounts, you
should review pending affiliate requests
and confirm or remove them.
If the Defer Signups option is disabled,
new affiliate account is created immediately after sign up. Affiliate will see
"welcome" page and receive email notification with instructions what is required
to do next.
If affiliate candidate submits signup form from the same
computer more than once in certain period of time, it is
considered as duplicate submission and warning message is
displayed. No new affiliate account is created. You can change
duplicate signup blocking period (or even disable this feature)
by Signup Persistence option
in admin options panel.
Important
Email notification with new affiliate details is sent to admin after
signup form is submitted. We suggest that you keep those emails for
further reference.
Do not sign up affiliates manually using automatic sign up page. It is
intended for affiliates signing up themselves only. If you need to add
an affiliate manually, use Add a New Affiliate
panel in admin interface.
2nd and 3rd tier affiliate referrals
are handled automatically.
Note
You may want to customize sign up pages and
email notifications your affiliates receive. Templates used for sign up
processing are stored in the Signup Panel portion of the Templates
section.
signup for automatic signup page.
pending for pending affiliate request page.
pending_email for pending affiliate email
notification.
welcome for affiliate welcome page.
welcome_email for affiliate welcome email
notification.
Affiliate Link supports 2- and 3-tier affiliate programs where affiliates may refer another affiliate and then get credited for that affiliate's commissions.
In a 2-tier program affiliates can participate in "parent-child" relations where each commission-generating action may log commissions for two affiliates instead of one. It is important to understand that 2nd tier affiliates are ordinary affiliates and may refer their own 2nd tier affiliates which may refer their own 2nd tier and so on. Being on 2nd tier means only that affiliate has a referring affiliate who should be credited too. This relation doesn't spread further and at most 2 affiliates are credited for each commission-generating action. Affiliate Link provides 1st and 2nd tier commission settings customizable for each affiliate. To disable 2nd tier commissions you can set all 2nd tier commission settings to zero.
In a 3-tier program, it's very much the same as a 2-tier, but you allow the affiliates to take it one step further. In a manner of speaking, instead of having a "parent-child" relationship, an affiliate can participate in a "grandparent-parent-child" relationship, and can now earn commissions on 2 different levels.
There are two ways for affiliates to sign up using 2- and 3-tier programs:
When visitor makes clickthrough to your site using the affiliate entrance script and then signs up as a new affiliate using script, Affiliate Link detects automatically (via cookies) that the new affiliate was referred by another affiliate and puts the new affiliate to 2nd tier. If someone then clicks through using the 2nd tier affiliate's link, and signs up up as a new affiliate themselves, they'll be set as 3rd tier, and the two before them will earn respective commissions from this newest affiliate.
Alternatively, admin can add new affiliate
manually using affiliate management panel and put referring affiliate ID#
into Parent Affiliate ID# box.
Note
By default Affiliate Link is configured to track 2 tiers. If you would
like to change this, please go here
A clickthrough is made when a visitor comes to your site from an
affiliate's site. It is a very important action in affiliate tracking
process and most of affiliate tracking is based on the clickthrough
concept. In order to get rewarded, affiliates should refer visitors
to your site (several sites or just a part of some site as well).
Then, visitors perform some activity on the target (yours) site:
purchasing goods, joining membership programs, subscribing to online
resources etc. Affiliate tracking system takes care of rewarding
commissions to affiliates for those activities, but in order to do
that, the affiliate tracking system must know that particular
visitor was referred by affiliate.
Without that information, it is impossible to tell ordinary visitors
from those referred by affiliates. And this information is created
and stored when a visitor performs a clickthrough.
You may or may not reward affiliate for clickthrough itself
(read more about clickthrough commissions),
but in either case, these steps must be done to perform affiliate
tracking correctly:
Affiliate refers visitors to your site (online resource) using
special URL assigned to affiliate on sign up or obtained via
affiliate interface later. Such URLs are unique to each affiliate
and should be used properly. Affiliates may assign such URLs to
banners and/or text links to your site placed on their sites, post
URLs in email messages (no SPAM allowed!) and so
on. Affiliates should never link visitors to your site directly
bypassing affiliate tracking URL (or affiliate tracking just won't
happen).
When visitor clicks on affiliate's URL to your site, affiliate
tracking system processes clickthrough first and then forwards
visitor to your site. This is done automatically and transparently,
and most visitors won't even notice that affiliate tracking process
took place (this doesn't violate user privacy because user-sensitive
information is not collected).
When clickthrough is being processed, affiliate tracking system
stores affiliate-related information in visitor's browser to be
retrieved later, when visitor does some commission-generating action.
This is done by saving a small portion of information called a
"cookie" in the browser's memory. The cookie contains only
the affiliate ID#.
When visitor purchases goods or subscribes to service etc. at your
site, the referring Affiliate ID# is retrieved from cookie and
commission is assigned to affiliate by the
sales tracking interface.
Notes
Sometimes it is impossible to use cookies due to legal or technology
restrictions. In such case, Affiliate Link may be adjusted to perform
affiliate tracking without cookies. Read more about this
here. Please contact technical support to
evaluate such tracking possibility in your particular case.
Please also note that it's not uncommon for people to have
problems when testing if a clickthrough is being recorded;
this is due to our anti-fraud features which block duplicate
clicks from the same host. Don't worry, it's still logging clicks
-- it's just doing so in a way that protects you from any cheating.
Clickthrough tracking is performed by Affiliate Link site entrance script
at
http://
In order to perform affiliate tracking correctly, all affiliates'
links to your site should point to this script. It accepts various
parameters to adjust processing and perform tracking actions.
The standard way to use the site entrance script is to provide the affiliate ID#
as a single parameter to it:
http://?AFFILIATE_ID
where AFFILIATE_ID is substituted with the actual Affiliate ID#. For example,
if the affiliate ID# is 123 then above link for this affiliate
would be
http://?123
When this link is clicked, the system redirects visitor to default
location of your site, set by Location option
in Affiliate Link options panel.
Advanced Syntax of
Calling Parameters
supports traditional name=value parameters as
opposed to single affiliate ID# parameter described above. This is useful if
you want to pass more than one parameter or if you want to have finer control
over affiliates entrance.
aid
Use mandatory aid parameter to set
affiliate ID#. Example: ?aid=28 where 28 is some
affiliate ID#.
mid
If your affiliates are running membership programs at their sites and
want to track how much each member of their site spends on your site, they
may set unique member ID# as optional mid
parameter to distinguish members from each other. Affiliate Link will track
sales by member statistics and display it in Sales by Member
affiliate report section (if it's enabled by corresponding report option).
mid should be unique for each member of one
affiliate (but it is allowed to have members with the same member ID# if they
belong to different affiliates). mid must not
contain spaces and must be 25 characters maximum.
redirect
To redirect visitors to specific location other than default location set
by Location option, use
redirect parameter with value set to URL-encoded target location. This feature works only if Strict Entrance Mode option is
disabled. Example: affiliate #135 wants to redirect visitors to
hughestracking.com. To implement this,
must be called with ?aid=135;redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fhughestracking.com
ent
Sometimes it impossible to use redirect parameter
described above because of limitations for URL length to be submitted to search
engine, email message and so on. Explicit redirection via redirect
tends to produce long URLs because target URL may be long and URL-encoding
makes it even longer. To solve this problem, Affiliate Link allows admin to
specify a set of custom entrances and assigns unique
number to each of them. To redirect visitor to one of those predefined entrances,
pass entrance number as ent parameter. This
produces short entrance URLs and works even if Strict Entrance Mode option is on.
Important
Parameter names are case-sensitive, so "aid=123" and
"Aid=123" are different and only the first is accepted as
affiliate ID#.
If Forward Clickthrough Parameters is enabled, then
will forward
all parameters except aid, mid,
redirect, ent to your site
(or to location set by redirect or ent
parameters). This may be handy if is used to redirect to
and/or from a search form query, catalog request etc.
If Block ClickThroughs from unknown
affiliates option is on and neither single parameter with affiliate
ID# nor aid parameter are set,
displays warning asking visitors to notify the webmaster of the site they are
coming from about the problem.
If affiliate with given ID# doesn't exist (or was deleted) and Block ClickThroughs from unknown
affiliates option is on, displays warning asking visitors
to notify the webmaster of the site they are coming from about the
problem.
If Strict Entrance Mode option
is on, redirect parameter is ignored and
default entrance location is used instead.
If entrance with number given by ent
parameter doesn't exist, default site location is used.
Note
Affiliates may use Custom Entrance
panel in affiliate management tool to generate custom entrance
URL with any target location. The system will ensure proper
syntax of call to
and will encode redirect parameter correctly.
In order to reliably log orders, and thus be able to award
commissions based on these order, we need our logging script
to be called directly after the shopping cart or order processing
application has decided that the transaction is successful. This
can occur in two basic ways.
Usually, on-line shopping carts and order processing applications
have a page that appears immediately after the order processing is
successfully completed. This page usually includes something like
"thank you for purchasing" so we will refer to this page as the
"thank you" page. Affiliate Link needs to be notified when the order
is completed, so the first way to integrate is to insert a small
snippet of HTML onto the "thank you" page (this is sometimes
called "pixel tracking"):
<img src="http://?ORDER_AMOUNT" />
where ORDER_AMOUNT is actual amount of the
order that has just been placed (with taxes, shipping
and handling excluded if possible). The way to have this
replacement done depends on the shopping cart capabilities
so in order to learn how to do it read the manual or contact
the author of the application. Some applications provide a
special string that should be added in the HTML source code
of the "thank you" page and that will be parsed when the
page is displayed. For instance, if we assume that this
string would be "%subtotal%" then the HTML snippet could
be written as follows:
<img src="http://?%subtotal%" />
Another example: if your shopping cart software is written in ASP, and
order total is stored in variable Total, and order tax is stored
in variable Tax, then the HTML snippet could be:
The second method of calling is accomplished
by either by making the browser send a GET or POST request, directly after a sale has been
successfully confirmed.
To call via GET
method, such as with the <img> tag above, put the parameters after
the question mar (?) and seperate them with either a semicolon (;) or ampersand (&). For example:
http://?a=b;c=d;e=f
Using POST, most commonly using an HTML form. For example:
Do not put any parameters into form action after
URL, use only form fields.
Advanced Syntax of
Calling Parameters
amount
To set order amount, use amount parameter.
Decimal part (if any) should be separated by point. All non-digit characters
are ignored, e.g. currency name. Example:
?amount=USD123.45
orderid
To set unique Order ID, use
orderid parameter. It should be 25 characters
maximum, any leading and trailing spaces are ignored. If your shopping cart
provides some unique order number or identification string, it is desirable
to log it via orderid parameter to make it
easier to identify a certain order when looking at the sales and commissions
reports provided by Affiliate Link. Example:
?orderid=A1B-234;amount=USD123.45
lv1_percent or
lv1_fixed
To set 1st tier affiliate commission, use either of
two parameters:
set lv1_percent parameter to the per sale
commission % (between 0 and 100, inclusive). Commission amount will be
calculated as given percent of the order amount. Example:
?amount=27.36;lv1_percent=12.5 will log order amount
27.36 and set 1st tier commission to 12.5% of 27.39 that is
3.42
set lv1_fixed parameter to the fixed
commission amount, independent of the order amount logged. Example:
?amount=0;lv1_fixed=2.50 will log order amount 0
(e.g., order is free) and set 1st tier commission to
2.50. This may be useful to set per lead commissions, where affiliate is
rewarded for visitors joining your service, submitting online survey etc.,
and there is no order amount at all.
Note that only one of lv1_percent or
lv1_fixed may be set, but not both. If neither
is set, 1st tier commission settings are taken from affiliates
database.
lv2_percent
orlv2_fixed
To set 2nd tier affiliate commission, use either of
two parameters:
set lv2_percent parameter to the per sale
commission % (between 0 and 100, inclusive). Commission amount will be
calculated as given percent of the order amount. Example:
?amount=11.67;lv2_percent=3 will log order amount
11.67 and set 2nd tier commission to 3% of 11.67 that is
0.35.
set lv2_fixed parameter to the fixed
commission amount, independent of the order amount logged. Example:
?amount=4.45;lv1_fixed=1.30 will log order amount
4.45 and set 2nd tier commission to 1.30.
Note that only one of lv2_percent or
lv2_fixed may be set, but not both. If neither
is set, 2nd tier commission settings are taken from affiliates
database.
lv3_percent or
lv3_fixed
To set 3rd tier affiliate commission, use either of
these two parameters:
set lv3_percent parameter to the per sale commission %
(between 0 and 100, inclusive). Commission amount will be calculated as given percent
of the order amount. Example: log.cgi?amount=9.95;lv3_percent=5 will log order amount
9.95 and set 3rd tier commission to 5% of 9.95, that is 0.49.
set lv3_fixed parameter to the fixed commission amount,
independant of the order amount logged. Example: log.cgi?amount=9.95;lv3_fixed=1 will
log order amount 9.95 and 3rd tier commission to 1.00.
lv1_xxx, lv2_xxx and
lv3_xxx parameters are independent, so you may
set lv1_percent and lv2_fixed,
lv1_fixed andlv2_percent, just
lv1_percent and let 2nd tier commission be default,
and so on. Use these parameters with care, and only if needed. In most cases, only order amount
and default affiliate commission settings (set within the admin panel) will be enough, without
any need to overwrite them with lvN_xxx parameters.
redirect
To redirect visitor to some "return page URL" use
redirect parameter and do not
insert call to
into <img> tag. If your
application does not allow customization of "thank you" page then maybe it
will let you set a "return page" you want to be displayed after the order
is complete, if this is your case then you can set
as the return page and pass another URL as redirect
parameter to
. It will log the order information and then
redirect the buyer to the URL you provided. Example:
where return page URL is "http://some.domain/path/to/return.html"
properly escaped: / translated to %2f and so
on.
aid
To use Affiliate Link in cookieless tracking
mode you need pass affiliate ID# directly to via
aid parameter when the sale is being logged.
This will also override any existing cookie.
mid
May be used with aid parameter to pass
member ID# in cookieless mode.
this would log a order amount of 9.95, the order ID to 'ABCD', as well as set the status of the order
to 'Pending', so that you can later decide whether the order is valid or not.
To process rebillings, use rebillingid
parameter. Certain on-line payment processors support rebillings, that is
they can be configured not only to charge the credit card of your client at
the time the order is placed, but from that moment on they can charge a
certain amount on it periodically. This is suitable if you sell
mebership-style or continued services like web hosting. In the case the buyer
was referred by one of your affiliates, you might want to credit a commission
to that affiliate not only when the order is placed, but on each rebilling
too. The credit card payment processor can use the following syntax to make
this happen:
where UNIQUE_REBILLING_ID is unique online payment system payee
ID# (or identification string). It must be included in parameters passed to
both on the first notification (order time) and on the
next ones (at rebilling time). The first call may be done in either of two
standard ways, by inserting image tag or by redirecting to return page. The
next calls may be done by a direct http connection from the on-line payment
processor server instead. Rebilling ID should be 25 characters maximum, any
leading and trailing spaces are ignored.
Important
In order to track sales correctly, the call to log.cgi needs
to be done by the user's browser; not by a third-party script
posting behind the scenes data. If this is not the case - if a
third-party script is indeed posting behind the scenes - then you
still might be able to use log.cgi via client-side tracking.
Also, order logging may be blocked in two fashions:
If "Block Duplicate Orders with Same ID" option
is enabled, then if the 'orderid' of an order matches that of another, the order will
not be logged.
If our
detects a per-session cookie in the client's browser,
the order will not be logged.
Either of the two may interfere with testing done, presumably to check if the orders are
being logged. In order to circumvent this, be certain that your cookie cache is emptied and
Block Duplicate Orders with Same ID is disabled (unchecked) in the Options section of the
admin panel.
If Order Log Redirection option is
on, performs redirection even if
redirect parameter is not present.
When redirection is performed, forwards all
parameters to the new location. Thus, can be
inserted between two phases of order processing without breaking it.
Parameter names are case-sensitive, so "OrderID=A-123"
and "orderid=B-124" are different and only second is
processed by
as order ID#.
Unless aid parameter is set,
takes Affiliate ID from cookie set to visitor's
browser. If there is no such cookie (it was outdated, or visitor didn't came
from affiliate's site), order is not referred by affiliate and would be
logged only if Log Unreferred
Orders option is enabled.
If aid parameter is set,
ignores cookie with Affiliate ID# set by
and uses value from aid
parameter.
If orderid parameter is not set, order will
be stored without order ID, and no Order ID will be displayed for that order
in reports.
If called without redirect parameter,
produces transparent 1x1 image that should not change layout of your page.
All special characters in parameters
should be URL-encoded (escaped) to be processed correctly. This is done by
translating character into its hexadecimal ASCII code and prepending % to it
(in ASP example above it is done by Server.UrlEncode() method).
For example, the slash (/) must be translated into
%2f where 2f is hexadecimal code
of /. Here is the table of some special characters and
their translations:
character
(space)
#
$
%
&
/
:
;
=
?
@
code
%20
%23
%24
%25
%26
%2f
%3a
%3b
%3d
%3f
%40
Note
If your e-commerce software provides unique order ID# for each sale, it
is recommended to log that order ID# into
affiliate tracking system, and enable Block Duplicate Orders with Same ID
option. This will ensure that no order will be logged twice.
In order to test your integration with Affiliate Link, you'll
need to follow these few simple steps. Please see below
for notes about repetetive tests.
Create an Affiliate: First, you'll need to create an affiliate within
your program. There are two methods which you may use in order to accomplish this:
The first is by signing up in the exact way which an affiliate would - by going to
your Signup URL given to you in the Welcome! e-mail that was sent to you when your
account was created, and filling out the form there. This will provide you with an
affiliate ID, linking code, and a good idea of what your affiliates will see when
they sign up.
Alternatively, you may log into your Admin Panel, and use it's built-in interface
to create a test affiliate. For instructions on this second method,
please click here.
Note: you'll only need to follow this particular step once, for
your first test.
Clicking Through: Either place the affiliate link directly into
your web browser's location bar, or create a small HTML page with the
linking code provided on that page. This should take you to your online
store.
Make a purchase: Place an order with your shopping cart / credit card
processor as a normal customer would. Depending on which e-commerce solution
you're using, there may or may not be a test mode to use, which does not actually
bill for a card for transactions.
Check the Orders: Log back into (or leave a separate window logged into)
your admin panel, and click on "Orders". Enter your Affiliate ID
(or, if you've made multiple test orders, you may wish to search by
"OrderID"), and click "List Orders". If your transaction
appears in the screen that immediately follows, then the test transaction has
been successful!
These steps should be followed precisely for each and every test
order made to Affiliate Link, else our anti-fraud features may create
incorrect or undesired results.
Clear your Cookie File: By default, Affiliate Link uses cookies in order to
track affiliate sales, signups, and clickthroughs. There are many instances where
the software will either ignore an instance, or warn of duplicate submissions if it
detects a cookie which it has placed from an earlier session. It may be necessary to
restart your browser for this to take effect.
Clear your Browser's Disk Cache: Often, if you're making multiple changes to a
site, you can wind up loading old data which is outdated. For some browsers, you can
simply hold your shift key while clicking the reload button; however it is safest
to clear your cache between each test, to avoid sending or receiving out of date
information.
Some sites do not have on-line sales system but provide customer registration
form, membership subscription etc. On-line sales system may have off-line
order form that customer may print, fill-in and then mail or fax to sales
department. In either case, online tracking with
may be impossible or unsuitable. To provide affiliate
tracking feature for such sites, Affiliate Link has a special client-side tracking script,
,
that allows to insert affiliate ID# on any page of the site for future use.
The exact behavior of is dictated by the
aid template, however by default affiliate ID insertion into a page
can be accomplished in two ways:
The first way of using requires that you
place something like the following line inside of the <head> ... </head> tags
of your HTML document:
When the page is loaded, it sets the JavaScript variable 'aid'
to the referrer's affiliate ID #, if applicable. Otherwise, JavaScript
variable 'aid' is set to "". If you specify a value other than 'aid', then
that it what it will use.
For our example, using the value 'aid', it inserts this JavaScript code fragment:
var aid = "AFFILIATE_ID";
Where AFFILIATE_ID is substituted by actual affiliate ID#.
After this has been placed, you can then make the affiliate id
appear anywhere within your page by using the following line of code:
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"><!-- document.write( aid ); //--></script>
Where ever you place the above line of code, the affiliate
ID will be printed on your page.
The second default method of inserting the affiliate ID is
by calling the script
from within a form, with the field parameter. For example:
<form action=".....">
<input type="text" name="Customer_Information">
.... other form fields here ...
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://?field=affiliateid"></script>
<input type="submit">
</form>
When the page containing this code is loaded, JavaScript fragment is
replaced automatically and the form will be:
<form action=".....">
<input type="text" name="Customer_Information">
.... other form fields here ...
<input type="hidden" name="affiliateid" value="AFFILIATE_ID">
<input type="submit">
</form>
Therefore, affiliate ID# will be submitted along with other fields.
Note that inserting the <script ...></script>
block outside of the <form></form> block
won't work.
Notes
For the first method of calling , you'll need
to place the document.write(); call exactly where you want the affiliate ID #
to appear when the page loads.
For the second method of calling , you must
place the JavaScript code exactly in the place where the input
field should appear.
Affiliate Link uses cookies in default tracking mode. Here is list of all
cookies used and their meaning:
AffiliateLink
Primary tracking cookie. May be persistent with expiration time controlled
by Persistence option. This cookie is
set by affiliate entrance script on
clickthrough and contains:
affiliate ID#, that was set by aid
parameter to
member ID#, if set by mid parameter to
.
This cookie is received and used by sales logging
interface script and by client-side logging script
.
AffiliateLinkLastClick
Duplicate clickthrough blocking cookie. May be persistent with expiration
time controlled by Clickthrough Persistence
option (using of this cookie may be also disabled by setting that option to
'-'). This cookie is set by affiliate entrance script on clickthrough and contains:
date and time of last clickthrough
affiliate ID#
This cookie is received by and used to detect
duplicate clickthroughs.
AffiliateLinkLastOrder
Duplicate order blocking cookie, current browser session only. This
cookie is used by sales tracking script and
contains:
date and time of last order logged
order ID#
affiliate ID#
member ID#
order amount
When the order is being logged, is called from order finalizing page.
Script sets this per-session cookie and if customer accidentally reloads order
finalizing page, cookie is already set and it allows script to detect that
page is being reloaded and to prevent paying affiliate commission twice for
the same order. Note that if your shopping cart (online sales) system provides
unique order ID#, it is preferable to enable Block
Duplicate Orders with the Same ID mode because it is more reliable
way to detect duplicates.
AffiliateLinkLastSignup
Duplicate signup blocking cookie. May be persistent with expiration time controlled
by Signup Persistence option (using
of this cookie may be also disabled by setting that option to '-'). This cookie
is set by affiliate signup script and contains:
affiliate ID#, assigned on previous submission of affiliate signup form
to
When affiliate accidentally submits signup form more than once, script
detects if the cookie is already set and warns affiliate for duplicate
submission. Note that this cookie may cause problems if someone tries to
signup more than one affiliate from the same computer -- Affiliate Link
will treat them as one signup. To workaround this either disable cookie
completely (setting Signup
Persistence option to '-') or make it per-session (by setting Signup Persistence option to '0')
and asking people to close and reopen browser for each affiliate sign
up.
AffiliateLinkLastRequest
Duplicate signup request blocking cookie. The same as
AffiliateLinkLastSignup cookie above but used if Defer Signups mode is on.
Unfortunately, sometimes it is impossible to use cookies for affiliate tracking
purposes because of customer privacy reasons (note that AffiliateLink cookies
do not store any private information anyway) or due to technical limitations.
In such cases, Affiliate Link provides cookieless tracking mode.
To use cookieless tracking mode, Affiliate Link requires additional cooperation with
the e-commerce system in use. Here is a brief illustration explaining how cookieless tracking
is most commonly performed:
When a visitor performs a clickthrough from an affiliate's site,
sends the affiliate ID number (and member ID number, if applicable) to your site
via the location URL rewrite mechanism. Here, a program
or script on your end must read and record this information.
Your site is then responsible for storing the affiliate and member ID
#'s for future use. It should take care of associating them with the
visitor, expiration, etc. When an order is placed, your cart or cc processor
will need to be able to decide whether or not the visitor placing the order
has been referred by an affiliate, and if so, what their affiliate id # is.
When a sale (or other commission-orientated action) is logged via
,
your site must pass the current affiliate ID# and member ID# back to us, using the
aid and midparameters, respectively.
Important
Not all e-commerce (shopping cart) systems support the receiving and storing
of additional information for future use (i.e., affiliate ID# and member ID#).
Please contact our technical support to evaluate your site software and consider
the possibility of using it in cookieless tracking mode.
With Affiliate Link, you are able to remotely update your order status from another server, defined in the options section of your Admin Panel.
Using this feature, you can use your own backend to communicate with our software, and decide the status of orders residing on our servers. This
can result in a more tightly integrated system. If you believe your system can handle this, please follow these directions:
Log into your Admin Panel, click on Options, and [Switch Advanced Mode]. Scroll down to the
Sales Tracking section of the Options section, and find the checkbox field labeled
Allow Online Status Update; enable (check) this option.
Scroll down to the text field immediately following, which will be labeled
Allow Online Status Update Pages. In this text field, you will need to place whichever
URL's your system will be calling our server from, each on separate lines, or delimited by a semicolon (;). Every URL must begin with
either http:// or https://, and you can input as many URL's as required.
Finally, you'll need to setup your system to call status.cgi like so:
To approve an order: status.cgi?orderid=ORDER_ID;status=approved
To set an order to pending status: status.cgi?orderid=ORDER_ID;status=pending
To delete an order: status.cgi?orderid=ORDER_ID;status=deleted
Where the ORDER_ID is the orderid which was originally called. This is how we identify exactly which logged order to act upon, and as such
is required.
For example, if you've logged an erroneous sale with the orderid of "ABCDEFG", and your account has been setup to
default to "Pending" status, you could use status.cgi to delete this sale from our database
like this: status.cgi?orderid=ABCDEFG;status=deleted
Note
You can restore the status of the order to whatever you would wish from within the Admin Panel, just as if you had changed it manually.
Starting an Affiliate Program has never been this easy!
Learn how to implement Affiliate Link 1.8 with your website, and
how to use the different features of Affiliate Link 1.8 to enhance
your online business.
These presentations detail some of the features available with
Affiliate Link 1.8, and how to use them to manage your performance
based program. As Affiliate Link 1.8 is developed, you will find
new presentations will be available here, explaining the
"how and why" of added features.
An explanation and simple instructions about customizing the Affiliate Link 1.8
templates for your program. Includes resources for basic html instruction.
An affiliate is a person whom partners with your business,
and refers customers to that business. On the Internet, this is
typically accomplished using hyperlinks, or references to other
sites. These are often simply called "links". The affiliate can
place a link to your site, effectively advertising your business from
their own.When a visitor clicks on this link, and follows it to your business' site -
he or she has now been referred - this is known as a "click through".
Finally, if and when the visitor decides to buy something, the affiliate
would be assigned a reward, either a fixed amount (say, 2 per order),
or based upon percentage (e.g., 5%). When this occurs, it's often called a "lead".
Use the Affiliates panel to search, list, add and remove affiliates. In addition,
this panel allows you to send e-mail to all or some of your affiliates.
To enter affiliate management panel, please click on the
AFFILIATES button in the main menu.
The affiliates database contains:
Affiliates
Ordinary members of your affiliate program, performing
actions and earning commissions.
Deleted Affiliates
Affiliates that have been removed from the program are placed
in their own list, so that if you'd like to restore
them later on, you may.
Pending affiliates
Candidates to affiliates, signed up while Defer Sign-ups mode is
ON. They must be approved by admin to became affiliates.
Advertisers
Some of affiliates may be marked as "advertisers", who are treated
specially in the paid e-mail ads tracking.
Advertisers are still present in affiliates database.
Click Affiliates in the main menu to enter affiliate
management panel.
Click Add a New Affiliate menu item.
Enter affiliate information into the form and click Add a New
Affiliate. The system will display a prompt about new affiliate sign
up.
The new affiliate will receive notification email, the same as affiliates
receive on automatic sign up.
Important
If you're using a 2-tier affiliate program and want to add a new
affiliate as another affiliate's referral, please enter that
affiliate ID into Parent Affiliate ID box. The same
applies for 3rd tier affiliates; you would simply
place the 2nd tier affiliate's ID # in the
Parent Affiliate ID box, and the new affiliate would
belong to both the 1st and 2nd, respectively.
The system will put default commission settings for the new
affiliate into corresponding fields, but you may change them.
Note that later changes in default commission settings
(done from the options panel) won't affect existing affiliates
unless you'll check the Reset for all affiliates box.
Notes
Affiliate ID will be assigned to the new affiliate automatically.
The new affiliate receives email notification generated from the
welcome_email template, under the Signup Panel
section. You may want to adjust this template
for your affiliate program.
Click Affiliates in the main menu to enter affiliate
management panel.
Use List selection box at the top of the search form to select
the type of affiliates you are going to search for (affiliates, pending
affiliates, deleted affiliates, or advertisers).
Fill in the search form fields. You can search by
Affiliate ID
Parent Affiliate ID
Company
First Name
Last Name
E-mail
City
State/Province
Country
Tax ID
Social Security #
Category
Custom Field #1
Custom Field #2
or any combination of them. For all fields except Affiliate ID, Parent
Affiliate ID, and Country, a case-insensitive substring search is performed.
For example, if you remember that affiliate's last name contains string "Mc" you
can just enter it and the search results will include all affiliates whose
last name includes that string (McCracken, McLaud, etc.). If you remember
just the domain of affiliate's e-mail address (say "yahoo.com") you can
narrow the search by entering "@yahoo.com" in the E-mail field, this will
produce a list of all affiliates whose last name include the string "Mc" and
whose e-mail address is at yahoo.com. Also you should not worry about the
capitalization the affiliate used when submitted e-mail address because the
search is case insensitive, this means the search results won't change
regardless of the way how affiliate wrote name (Mclaud, etc.) and e-mail
address (john@yahoo.com, john@yahoo.COM, John@yahoo.COM, etc.).
For the Affiliate ID field, you may input multiple ID's into the field, delimited by spaces or commas (,), and it
will search for all affiliates that match the desired criteria.
To restrict search only to affiliates who signed up within certain
timeframe, use the timeframe selection box.
Using the Output section of the search form, you can adjust
output result output format:
To change output destination, use To selection box
and select any of the following options
Browser
This is default.
Microsoft Excel
Results will be exported to Microsoft Excel format and, if
Microsoft Excel application is properly installed on your
computer, will be loaded directly into Excel spreadsheet.
Delimited Text
Search results will be exported into a
tab-delimited text file suitable
for import into database and/or accounting software. After submitting the
search form you will be prompted to save the file.
Microsoft Excel (all data)
The same as Microsoft Excel option above, but results will
include all affiliate data stored in system database, including address,
phone/fax, commission settings etc. May be used to make off-line backup of
affiliate database.
Delimited Text (all data)
The same as Delimited Text option above, but results will include
all affiliate data from system database including all personal information
fields, commission settings etc. This option is suitable to make complete
off-line backup of affiliates database.
To compress results on-the-fly, check Compress with gzip box.
This significantly decreases network traffic by packing results with gzip
compression utility. Modern browsers will unpack output automatically.
However, if you need to do that manually please use any archiver utility
that supports gzip format, e.g. WinZIP.
To change number of result rows per page, use Results per Page
selection box. Note that switching to Excel or Delimited Text output formats
automatically selects All results.
To change sorting of output rows, use Sort by selection box
where you can select field to sort search results by.
To change sort order from ascending (default) to descending,
use the Descending box.
To get search results, click Search Affiliates button.
Important
If your database contains large number of affiliates, searching may take
some time to complete. Please be patient and click Search Affiliates
button only once to avoid overloading the system.
After submitting affiliate search form with output format set to
browser, you will see search results panel with affiliates table.
For each affiliate found, the system will display one table row with these
fields:
ID
First Name
Last Name
Company
E-mail
Per Sale commission %
Per Click commission amount
Parent Affiliate ID (if any)
In addition, two auxiliary fields will be displayed for each affiliate:
check box to select affiliate for removal (for confirmation if pending
affiliates are listed)
EDIT link to the page with affiliate details where you can modify
them.
To sort results by any of listed columns, click on that column header (or
footer). Click on the same column to change sort order from ascending to
descending and vice versa. Current sorting column will be marked by up or
down arrow depending on sort direction (ascending or descending).
To display another results page, use Next/Previous
links at the top and bottom of results page, or enter page number into
Page box and click "Go!".
To display all affiliates who were referred by listed affiliate, click on
that affiliate's ID.
To send e-mail to affiliate, click on e-mail address.
To display parent affiliate, click on Parent Affiliate ID.
To remove some of the listed affiliate(s)
Check the box near EDIT link at the right of affiliate's row.
Select Remove Only Selected Affiliates item in the action select
box at the bottom of results table.
Confirm removal by checking box near GO button.
Click GO button to remove affiliates.
The system will display the prompt with the number of affiliates successfully
removed.
To remove all affiliates listed on the page
Select Remove All Listed Affiliates item in the action select
box at the bottom of results table.
Confirm removal by checking box near GO button.
Click GO button to remove affiliates.
The system will display the prompt with the number of affiliates successfully
removed.
To confirm some pending affiliate(s) (if you listed pending affiliates)
Check the box near EDIT link at the right of affiliate's row.
Select Confirm Only Selected Requests item in the action select
box at the bottom of results table.
Confirm action by checking box near GO button.
Click GO button to confirm requests and make pending affiliates the
approved ones.
The system will display the prompt with the number of request successfully
confirmed.
To confirm all pending affiliate(s) listed on the page (if you listed
pending affiliates)
Select Confirm All Listed Requests item in the action select box
at the bottom of results table.
Confirm action by checking box near GO button.
Click GO button to confirm requests and make pending affiliates the
approved ones.
The system will display the prompt with the number of request successfully
confirmed.
Note
Parent Affiliate ID is displayed for affiliate only if affiliate was referred by another affiliate.
If you want to remove some of the listed affiliates
In the search results table, check the box near EDIT link at the
right of affiliate's row for each affiliate you want to remove.
Select Remove Only Selected Affiliates item in the action select
box at the bottom of results table.
Or, if you want to remove all affiliates listed on the page
Select Remove All the Listed Affiliates item in the action
select box at the bottom of results table.
Confirm removal by checking box near GO button.
Click GO button to remove affiliates. The system will display the
prompt with total number of affiliates removed.
Notes
You may also remove affiliate using the Edit Affiliate panel.
Affiliates who are deleted are placed in a special list, which is accessed by
selecting 'Deleted Affiliates' via the listbox labled Search in
the Affiliate Search section. You may
restore affiliate's at a later date, if
desired.
Click EDIT link at the right of result row with affiliate
you want to edit. The "Edit Affiliate" panel will appear.
Modify the affiliate's fields, which include:
Per Click Commission
Per Sale Commission (%)
Per Sale Commission (fixed $ amount)
2nd Tier Per Click Commission
2nd Tier Per Sale Commission (%)
2nd Tier Per Sale Commission (fixed $ amount)
2nd Tier Signup Commission
3rd Tier Per Click Commission
3rd Tier Per Sale Commission (%)
3rd Tier Per Sale Commission (fixed $ amount)
3rd Tier Signup Commission
Language
First Name
Last Name
Password
Email
Company
Address
City
State/Province
Zip/Postal Code
Country
Tax ID
Social Security Number
Phone
Fax
Custom Field #1
Custom Field #2
Note:
Make sure that required fields are non-empty.
You may change an affiliate's individual commissions from here, which
overrides the default commissions settings. For example, if you have a flat
rate commission of 5, you could
choose to give a more responsive affiliate
10, or even go as
far as giving them a percentage of the sale, instead of a flat amount.
Use the Advertiser box to mark affiliate as advertiser and vise
versa.
Click Update Affiliate Account to submit changes and return to
affiliate search results panel.
You can also remove affiliate:
Confirm removal by checking Confirm Removal box at the bottom
of the page.
Click Remove This Affiliate button.
You may also restore an affiliate, if they've been removed:
Confirm restoration by checking Check to Confirm
box at the bottom of the page.
Click the Restore this Affiliate button.
Important
If you searched for advertisers, and then cleared Advertiser box
when editing affiliate, that affiliate would disappear from search
results.
Notes
Categories of Information entry section appears only if at least
one category exists in the system database.
To display parent (referring) affiliate details click on parent affiliate
ID#.
If you update the field on which affiliate search results are sorted,
affiliate may not appear on the current search results page after clicking
Update Affiliate Account because affiliate's search position was
changed.
You cannot mark pending affiliate as advertiser. Pending affiliate
request should be confirmed first.
If an affiliate unsubscribes themselves from your affiliate program,
from within their affiliate statistics panel, then Affiliate Link
permanently deletes all record of them. You may not restore the
affiliate if they so choose to leave your program in this fashion.
Using Affiliates Search Form, set List
selection to Pending Affiliates and search for pending affiliates.
If you want to confirm some of the listed affiliate requests
In the search results table, check the box near EDIT link at the
right of affiliate's row for each request you want to confirm.
Select Confirm Only Selected Requests item in the action select
box at the bottom of results table.
Or, if you want to confirm all requests listed on the page
Select Confirm All the Listed Requests item in the action select
box at the bottom of results table.
Confirm action by checking box near GO button.
Click GO button to confirm requests and make pending affiliates the
approved ones. The system will display the prompt with the number of request
successfully confirmed.
Important
Confirmed requests disappear from the search results.
Note
You may also confirm affiliate using Edit Affiliate panel:
Click on the EDIT link at the right of affiliate's row.
Confirm action by checking box near Confirm This Request button.
Click Confirm This Request button.
Each confirmed affiliate will receive email notification, generated from signup/welcome_email.tpl
template. You may want to adjust this template for your affiliate program.
Click on the EDIT link at the right of affiliate's row.
Confirm action by checking box near Remove This Request button.
Click Remove This Request button.
Each affiliate candidate whose request was canceled (removed) will receive email
notification, generated from signup/disapproved.tpl template.
You may want to adjust this template for your
affiliate program.
Use the mass email feature to send email messages to some or all of your
affiliates. You may want to inform affiliates about new incentives,
updates in your site content, affiliate program configuration (e.g., commissions,
new entrances, etc) changes or about anything you may think is important to
your affiliates. You have the choice to send the emails in either plain text, or
in HTML (MIME encoded) format; this allows you much greater flexibility as to how
your messages will appear to the affiliates.
The system allows you to email a large number of recipients in a
short amount of time, but it will send email to registered affiliates
only and there is no way to email people outside your affiliate
program. Affiliate Link provides limited ability to personalize your
mass emails by automatic insertion of affiliate name, email, and ID#
into each message.
You may target your emailings by category,
country, state and zip code and then send email to all affiliates
matching target criteria, or limit number of recipients. If number
of affiliates selected by targeting criteria is greater than number
of recipients requested, only given number of recipients will be
emailed. Next time when affiliates are selected for emailing
with limited number of recipients, the system selects least
recently emailed affiliates first, i.e., the system always tries
to select those affiliates who weren't emailed for a longer period
of time than other affiliates. If the number of candidates is still
greater than needed, recipients are selected in round-robin manner.
Such selection allows to send your emailings to larger number of
affiliates making your audience larger, and minimizes number of emails
that each affiliate receives within given period of time, making email
less annoying.
Paid Emails
Affiliate Link with conjunction of its mass email system may be
used to run "Get Paid to Read Email" affiliate programs where you
pay your affiliates for reading email you send them. This is done
by embedding one or more paid links into email message sent to
affiliate. When affiliates click on such link, the system rewards
them commission assigned to that link, and takes care about paying
each affiliate only once for each paid link. Paid email statistic
and commissions are displayed in administrator and affiliate reports.
Another interesting concept related to paid emails is "advertisers".
Affiliate Link allows you to mark some affiliates as advertisers
(using affiliate management) and later send paid emails on behalf of
any advertiser. Note that advertiser never sends email directly,
instead he/she should ask administrator (you) to do that and you
may ask advertiser to pay for sending mass email. The system allows
to have many advertisers among affiliates and this allows to implement
peer-to-peer paid email program. In affiliate reports advertisers can
see how many emails were sent on their behalf and how many paid
clickthroughs were made for each email.
The system also supports modification of 3-tier affiliate program
regarding advertisers. If your advertiser pays you to send paid email,
and this advertisers was referred by affiliate, you may want to credit
affiliate who referred advertiser with commission
for each paid email click. This encourages affiliates to refer advertisers
who then pay you money to send emails to other affiliates.
Click Affiliates button in main menu to enter Affiliate management panel. Click Email Affiliates
button in the top menu to enter mass email settings panel.
Fill in mass email form fields
Categories
Check Email All Affiliates box in category selection to email
all affiliates without referring to categories
they selected.
Alternatively, you may select some categories to send email only to affiliates
who subscribed to at least one category from your selection.
Country
Select country to email affiliates from that country only. There are
three special choices in country selection box:
<All>
This is default. Affiliates from all countries are selected.
<US>
Only affiliates from USA are selected. Allows to send emails with
offers valid only in USA
<non-US>
Only affiliates form countries other than USA are selected. Useful for sending
emails with international offers etc.
Zip Code
Select only affiliates with zip code exactly equal to value entered in
this box (case-insensitive). Leave blank to select all affiliates.
State
Select affiliates from the given state (case-insensitive). Leave blank to
select all affiliates.
Advertiser
If you want to send email on behalf of advertiser, select advertiser
here. System displays affiliate ID# and name for each advertiser. Select
<none> (that is default) to send non-paid emails or paid
emails not related to any advertiser.
Recipients
Enter intended number of recipients here. Enter 'all' (without quotes) to
email all affiliates.
Ad-Link URLs
Enter up to 9 paid links to be embedded into email body. For each link to
be sent you should enter valid URL beginning with http://, and
commission settings
1st tier per click commission -- self-explanatory
2nd tier per click commission -- self-explanatory
3rd tier per click commission -- self-explanatory
referral commission -- amount to be rewarded to affiliate who referred
advertiser (if any) for which this email is being sent.
By default, these settings are copied from system Commission Settings, but you can
customize them for each link individually. Links with URL left blank
Subject
Enter email subject here. Please make it short, concrete and
self-explanatory. Note that paid emails will be identified by
subject in detailed affiliate reports.
Body
You can send email in either (or both) plain text or HTML (MIME encoded)
format, by typing your message in the respectively labeled text box.
The email message will contain this body exactly as you write it,
with small header with affiliate program identification added automatically.
For HTML formatted emails, only include what would be inside of the
<body> ... </body> tags of an HTML document;
the software handles the rest for you.
Email body supports some special placeholders (special template variables)
to be replaced with actual values for each affiliate:
[name]
Optional. Will be replaced with the affiliate's name (first and
last names) for each recipient.
[id]
Optional. Will be replaced with affiliate ID# for each recipient.
[email]
Optional. Will be replaced with the affiliate's e-mail address.
[link-1] .. [link-9]
Mandatory for each link with non-empty URL entered above. Will be
replaced by encrypted clickthrough link for each affiliate. Note that
target URL will be invisible, thus preventing affiliates from clicking
directly to it bypassing affiliate tracking. Instead, embedded link
will point to Affiliate Link paid email clickthrough tracking script
which ensures that affiliate is credited only once for clicking paid
link even if he/she clicks many times, and redirects affiliate to
actual URL (that you entered in Link URL entry box above). Redirection
to target URL is always performed, even if it is a duplicate clickthrough
and no commission is credited to affiliate.
Check box receive a copy of the message if you want to send copy
of email to admin, e.g. for verification or accounting purposes.
Confirm emailing by checking box near Send Affiliates This
Message button.
Click Send Affiliates This Message button to
launch mass emailing. The system will display notification page with mass
email session ID# to refer to this session later if needed.
When the session is completed, system sends notification email to administrator
with session statistics (time elapsed, number of recipients emailed etc.).
Additionally, if there was advertiser selected for emailing, system will notify
advertiser too.
If mass emailing session was failed or interrupted for some reason, error
message is emailed to administrator. It will include session ID# and short
problem description. Please include that email in any request to technical
support about incomplete email session.
Important
The actual number of recipients matching selection criteria may be less than
requested in Recipients field.
The least east recently emailed recipient selection method is used for all mass
emailings no matter what settings and selection criteria is used (all mass
emails are considered the same for recipient rotation).
The system tries to minimize total number of emails each affiliate receives
making email less annoying to affiliates.
The system tries to maximize total number of different affiliates receiving
emails, making audience larger.
Note
Mass emailing session with many recipients may take hours to be sent out
and consume significant fraction of system resources. Please avoid sending
next sessions in short period of time after the first session.
Use this panel to search, list, add and remove orders. Usually, orders are
added via integration with on-line order processing
system or shopping cart. You can also add orders manually, using the
Add a New Order panel, for example, to
credit an affiliate for an order that has taken place offline.
To enter order management panel, please click on the ORDERS button in the main menu.
Click Orders in the main menu to enter order
management panel.
Select one of the following from the Type listbox:
Approved (default)
Pending
Deleted
This will allow you to decide which of the three types of
orders will be displayed.
Fill in search form fields. You can search orders by
Order ID#
Affiliate ID#
Member ID#
From Date
To Date
or any combination of the three.
Adjust result output format
To change output destination, use Output to selection box and
select any of the following options
Browser
This is default.
Microsoft Excel
Results will be exported to Microsoft Excel format and, if Microsoft
Excel application is properly installed on your computer, will be loaded
directly into Excel spreadsheet.
Delimited Text
Search results will be exported into tab-delimited text file
suitable for import into database and/or accounting software. After submitting
search form you will be prompted to save the file.
To compress results on-the-fly, check Compress with gzip box.
This significantly decreases network traffic by packing results with gzip
compression utility. Modern browsers will unpack output automatically.
However, if you need to do that manually please use any archiver utility that
supports gzip format, e.g. WinZIP.
To change number of result rows per page, use Results per Page
selection box. Note that switching to Excel or Delimited Text output format
automatically selects All results.
Click List Orders to get search results.
Notes
By default, date range is current month.
Leave all fields blank to list all orders logged within current month.
After submitting order search form with output format set to
browser, you will see search results panel with orders
table. For each order found, the system will display one table
row with these fields:
Date
Order ID#
Amount
Affiliate ID#
Commission
2nd Tier Affiliate ID#
2nd Tier Commission
3rd Tier Affiliate ID#
3rd Tier Commission
In addition, check box to select order for removal will be displayed at the
right of each table row.
To display affiliate details, click on Affiliate ID#.
To display another results page, use
Next/Previous links at
the top and bottom of results page.
To remove some of the order(s) on the page
Check the box at the right of order row.
Select Remove Only Selected Orders item in the action select box
at the bottom of results table.