External Affiliate Network Setup (General)
If you are using an external affiliate network/software (like Cake or Tune) to manage your affiliates, you can still use the CRM’s affiliate system to track clicks, lead and sales. You can also place the pixels within the affiliate profile which will send the conversion to the external affiliate network.
First, follow this article to create an affiliate profile named as the affiliate software you are using.
Next, edit that new affiliate profile and set one of the Passed Values to be the publisher value (and another to be the sub affiliate value if needed for internal tracking). You can add up to 5 passed values allowing you to use the other 3 for other tracking values, such as transactionId, clickId, etc.
For more information on Passed Values, please view this article!
Now that you have the passed values configured, take the tracking string you see above the Passed Values section and use this to create the links for your affiliates.
Example:
Landing Page: https://www.yourdomain.com/
+
Tracking String: ?affId=6F422330&c1=[c1]&c2=[c2]&c3=[c3]
=
https://www.yourdomain.com/?affId=6F422330&c1=[c1]&c2=[c2]&c3=[c3]
https://www.yourdomain.com/?affId=6F422330&c1=[publisherValue]&c2=[subAffiliate value]&c3=[c3]
If you are using Konnektive’s form-code - As long as the affId and passed values are inside the URL, these will be stored to the click and also the lead or sale that occurs.
If you are using Direct API - Send the tracking link into the requestUri on the first Import Click call that is made. This API call should be made once the customer lands on that first page of the funnel. The response from this API request will return a sessionId. Pass this sessionId on all subsequent API calls for the customer so they are all connected to the same session containing the affiliate parameters. Please view our Suggested API Flow article for more information on using the Import Click API
You can also parse the affId and passed values and send them into the Import Lead or Import Order API request.
This article will explain how to add the pixels into the CRM.
As long as you follow the instructions above and the instructions inside the pixel article, you should be able to see the pixel details on your test orders in the CRM and also the conversions on the affiliate software side. If you are having any difficulties getting pixels to fire, you can follow our Troubleshooting CPA Pixels article to see what might be missing from the configuration.
When viewing the Affiliate Report, the sales will will be displayed under each affiliate profile that you have created.
You can click the green arrow next to each source to expand and see all of the publisher values who contributed to the data being displayed. Each publisher can then be expanded once more to view the sub affiliate values that have been passed in within the date range.
On the Order Details and Transaction Details report, you can filter by a publisherId and/or subAffiliateId after you select the main affiliate profile on the “Affiliate” filter.
The Sub Affs tab on the affiliate profile shows all publisher values received for this affiliate.
You can disable sub affiliates (publishers) if you think they are sending bad traffic. Orders attached to disabled publishers will not be processed and instead will be declined with the message "Affiliate 33312 blacklisted." with 33312 in this example being the publisher value.
Disabled sub affiliates can be re-enabled.