General External Affiliate Software/Network Setup
If you are using an external affiliate network/software such as Everflow, Cake, Voluum or Tune to manage your affiliates, you will typically want to use the CRM’s affiliate system to facilitate the tracking of clicks, leads and sales into that software. Placing the conversion pixels/postbacks within the affiliate profile makes it much easier for you to manage your affiliates within your CRM.
The sections below will walk you through setting up and testing an external affiliate network/software.
CRM Setup
Start by creating 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, cid, etc.
Once 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]
A properly configured Tracking URL will look like this:
https://www.yourdomain.com/?affId=6F422330&c1=46354&c2=75956&c3=e7bb884496bb444cbfd94541c683dZ90
Notice how all of the hard bracket values after the equal signs are replaced with real values.
The last step of the CRM setup is to create the conversion pixel/postback. This will send the sale data over to the affiliate software so they can track the sales on their end.
Website Setup
Follow the relevant instructions below depending on if you are using the Funnel Builder or Direct API:
Konnektive 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.
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 API
You can also parse the affId and passed values and send them into the Import Lead or Import Order API request.
If your affiliate software requires a transactionId, clickId, cid, etc. to be sent back to them on the conversion pixel/postback, then they will likely need you to place a script on the page that the customers will be landing on. This script would be reaching out to the affiliate software to acquire the needed ID, and including that ID on the conversion pixel/postback helps the affiliate software link the sale to a click.
For either the Direct API or the Konnektive Form-Code, this script should occur before the Import Click API is called, this way you can include the ID within the requestUri - which is the parameter the CRM will read that value from.
Testing
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.
Reporting
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.
Publishers
The Publishers tab on the affiliate profile shows all publisher values received for this affiliate.
You can disable 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 PUB-VAL blacklisted." with PUB-VAL in this example being the publisher value.
Disabled Publishers can be re-enabled.
Additional Specific Software Documentation
Everflow
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