With a traditional affiliate system your affiliates are given pre-constructed affiliate links to use in their marketing efforts. The links are clicked and when the customer makes a purchase, the referring affiliate is issued a commission. This is all done via internal tracking after the link is clicked on. But what if you don’t have a traditional checkout process via a shopping cart system or what if your affiliates are marketing using a method that doesn’t involve a link being clicked? We still need a way to associate the customer with the affiliate. To do this, we have a few ideas for you below.
An idea here would be to display the referring affiliate’s ID on your website somewhere. When the affiliate link is clicked, the customer is taken to your website and the affiliate ID is displayed for them. While on the phone have your customer read the ID number to you. You can then manually create a commission for that affiliate. To display the affiliate ID on your website, you can go to General Settings > Affiliate Co-Branding > Display Affiliate Data (tab) in your iDevAffiliate admin center.
Using this method, customers would go directly to your website and manually input an affiliate ID provided to them. This effectively associates the customer with the affiliate, just as if the affiliate’s link had been clicked. In your admin center, go to Commission Settings > Offline Marketing. Setup the provided HTML box on your website somewhere. When a customer comes to the website they can enter the affiliate ID number directly into the box. If that customer makes a purchase the referring affiliate will get a commission just like normal online marketing.
If you are using a compatible cart system, you can use coupon code commissioning. Using this setup, you would create a coupon code in your shopping cart system then assign that code to your affiliate. The customer then distributes the assigned coupon code to his/her customers and as the coupon code is used during checkout, the customer is issued the discount but the assigned affiliate is also issued a commission.
Note: This has really become the replacement for #2 above. However, a compatible cart system is required to use it.
Here you can trigger a commission on a lead form or other confirmation form that the customer will fill out. Once the deal closes, login to your admin center and approve that commission. Use the pay-per-lead tracking pixel and set the commission amount to 1.00 (as a placeholder). Then at the time of approval manually change the commission amount from 1.00 to whatever it really should be then hit the approve button. To get this tracking pixel login to your admin center and go to the cart integration wizard and enable the pay-per-lead tracking pixel. The following page will have the pixel that needs placed into the confirmation page.