Affiliates

Affiliates Helping Your Business Grow

The Affiliates section enables you to measure the performance of your Affiliates. If you select a specific calendar month, you are able to assign commission payments to any of your Affiliates which may optionally trigger an accompanying email notification of each payment.

Affiliates are not necessarily business partners, they are quite often companies such as Google offering PPC (Pay Per Click) services. It becomes necessary to monitor the conversion rates from such sites in order to determine which PPC campaigns are consistently producing new business, enabling you to review your advertising expenditure.

Bluepark provides what is known as "Affiliate Tracking". You are able to create special URLs which Affiliates should always use to link to your site. These special links effectively "tag" new site customers arriving from your Affiliates. The tag is maintained all the way to the point of order.

A simple link to your homepage could be rewritten as follows:

Before:  http://www.domain.co.uk
After:  http://www.domain.co.uk/index/ref/www.google.co.uk/

Please note that Affiliate links to your homepage must contain "index" as the true location of your homepage is "index.html". The following example better illustrates the position of the page name in an Affiliate link:

Before:  http://www.domain.co.uk/offers.html
After:  http://www.domain.co.uk/offers/ref/www.google.co.uk/

These links will successfully tag new customers following an Affiliate link from Google, but they fail to tell us which keyword campaign yielded the link. The previous example may be expanded as follows:

After:  http://www.domain.co.uk/offers/ref/www.google.co.uk/my+search+terms/

The link above tells us that the customer connected from Google following a search for "my search terms". Note that spaces should be converted to "+" (plus) characters in Affiliate links. Please note that such links can be generated automatically via the Affiliate Editor.

You can view your Top Referral Conversions in Sales Statistics. You can also see exactly where each customer has come from in Site Statistics as Affiliate referrals are marked with an appended "(A)".