Affiliate Hoplinks to multiple pages (not products)?

[shannon]

I've been reading all kinds of interesting stuff about E-junkie's affiliate program, but haven't found the exact answer to my question yet.



I would like to make sure that affiliates get credit for any future purchases from referrals they make to free downloads I have on my sites. Those downloads aren't products for sale on e-junkie, so I can't create a direct hoplink for them.



Looks like I could have one of those pages as the common hoplink, but I'd like to have more.



Is there anyway to generate an affiliate link to a page (other than through the common hoplink) that doesn't have a product for sale through E-Junkie?



Thanks for any help.



Shannon

[E-junkie_Guru]

It sounds like you would want to use our Hop Link method. When a buyer clicks any affiliate's Hop Link for your program, that sets a cookie in the buyer's browser that lasts for 6 months and redirects them to your landing page URL for that Hop Link. Any affiliate-eligible product that buyer purchases from you during the lifespan of that cookie will earn a commission for the referring affiliate.



You can configure a Common Hop Link (in Seller Admin > Affiliate Program Settings) that would give your affiliates one, easy link to obtain for referring buyers to your site. For your Common Hop Link URL "landing page", you can specify any page at all really, not necessarily one where you're using E-junkie buttons. Most merchants simply make this their site's homepage or main "online store entrance" page.



You can also/instead configure Product-Specific Hop Links (Admin > Product-specific Affiliate Program Settings) if you want your affiliates to obtain a Hop Link for a particular product that redirects buyers to your purchase page for that exact product.

[shannon]

Hey Tyson,



Thanks for your response. It looks like I didn't do a very good job of asking my question though!



So I understand about the Common Hop Link that allows affiliates to refer buyers to any page I specify on my site, and Product-Specific Hop Links that allow affiliates to refer buyers to a purchase page for a particular product.



What I'm wondering, is if there is any other way to create a Hop Link? Such as a Hop Link that directs a buyer to a blog post, sets the cookie for any purchases before expiring. In essence, a way to create a Hop Link that could link to any particular page on my website permanently (i.e. not changing the Common Hop Link).



I hope that makes sense!



Thanks,

Shannon

[E-junkie_Ninja]

You can set the URL of the hop link to which ever part of your site you want affiliates to send your buyers. This link will not change until you change the location by editing the affiliate settings.

[shannon]

Thanks E-junkieNinja.



I guess I'm still not being very clear with my question, though. Let me see if I can ask it a different way:



With 1shoppingcart, you can turn any url into an affiliate link by using this formula:



[your affiliate link]&u=[link you want to make a custom link]



Does e-junkie have anything like that?



Or, are you limited to specifying page urls in the common link or product specific links.



Thanks!

[E-junkie_Guru]

Sorry, there's no way to do that from our end within our standard affiliate settings.



However, you could hire a developer to program some custom scripting at your end that could accomplish this. Any extra parameters added to an affiliate link URL that our system doesn't recognize will be passed along to your landing page URL, so e.g. if an affiliate makes their Common Hop Link URL look like this:



https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?cl=40815&c=ib&aff=20545&this=that



...the buyer would be redirected to your landing page URL looking like this:



http://www.yoursite.com/landingpage.php?this=that



Notice how the this=that parameter was retained? Then your landing page could have some custom scripting that looks for those and instantly re-redirects the buyer to a certain other page accordingly. E.g. if the script finds this=that it would send the buyer one place, or this=other would take them some other place, etc., and finding no extra parameter could simply leave the buyer at your standard landing page.



We can recommend some competent, E-junkie-experienced developers in our directory here:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/developer-directory.htm

[mkp007]

This is good stuff. I current want to offer affiliates a way to point to specific products on my site with product specific ads on their site. The "program specific affiliate program settings" you mentioned earlier are confusing and do not seem to achieve what I want simply. Passing on the extra parameter "this=that" or "product=scoretable" would work nicely. Does anyone have a simple example on this implementation?



I tried doing some research for "redirect using variables ammended to url".



javascript: http://webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=222202



php: http://drupal.org/node/471862 and http://drupal.org/node/139196 and http://www.dynamicdrive.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20337



thoughts, suggestions?

[E-junkie_Guru]

What didn't seem to be working as you needed with our product-specific affiliate settings? Those settings allow you to enable a product-specific hop link with its own landing page URL. Affiliates can then obtain their hop link code for that particular product and post that link to their site, so buyers clicking that link would be redirected to that product-specific landing page.



If you haven't found it yet, you'll probably appreciate this help page explaining our affiliate system and settings:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.affiliates.htm



We also have a help page for affiliates, explaining our affiliate system and how to use it from their perspective:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.for-affiliates.htm

[unknownartifact]

Hello,



The following is a write-up of my usage of the E-Junkie Common Affiliate Program. I too wanted to give my affiliates the ability to hop to any page on my site using the Common Affiliate Program and still place the affiliate cookie. Toward the end of the write-up is where I describe how to use custom query string values to accommodate multiple URLs for the Common Affiliate Program. The write-up details how it works and shows the code (JavaScript, in this case) that makes it work. Hopefully this is still useful/relevant to this thread.



http://unknownartifact.com/marketing/adding-an-e-junkie-affiliate-program/



Feedback and suggestions are always welcome.



Regards,

CJ

[mkp007]

CJ,



Nice post. I appreciate you sharing this. This easy implementation will allow affiliates to have links on their page that go directly to a product rather than just a home page.



The limitation is that only the common commission will apply to all products and affilliates.



It would be useful to have different commission levels based on monthly affiliate sales. For example



Monthly Sales Range Commission

$0-$1000 10%

$1000-$5000 13%

$5000-$10,000 16%



This would further encourage affiliates to push your product.



E-Junkies affiliate program is lacking features. I don't think many people use it or else we would see some improvements and new features. It would make sense to me if there was a settings page for each affiliate where we could go in and assign different commissions for each product or maybe a custom commission structure as described above. It's a chicken and egg problem. E-Junkie won't invest in improvements if people aren't using it, however, more people may use it if the program was intuitive and feature packed.



Anyways, thanks again CJ! Very useful.

[unknownartifact]

Ah, yes... a performance based commission would be a nice E-Junkie feature, if it doesn't already exist. Maybe it's on the to-do list (or wish list) at least. Regards.

[englishconvers]

I agree with the above wishes. It would be very helpful to us if ejunkie were to offer the ability to create multiple hop-links in the common affiliate settings and have the ability to create performance-based commissions. Those features would make a big difference.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Thanks for the suggestion; we'll add that to the wishlist. Meanwhile, you can already assign individual affiliates an extra percentage, in Seller Admin > View/Edit Affiliates, so if you look at your Transaction Log or monthly masspay.txt file and notice a lot of business coming from a particular affiliate, you can reward them with a commission boost that way.

[nadia17]

Hi,



I have the same question as discussed in this thread, but the thread is a few years old and I wonder if this functionality is available now.



So the question is.. my affiliates would like to point traffic to different internal pages on my site (e.g. different blog posts) and still get a commission on their sales. I only sell one product, so I guess product-specific hop links won't do it for me.



Is there any way to accomplish this using standard E-Junkie functionality or do I still need to hire a developer to add parameters to my common hop link?



Thanks!

[E-junkie_Guru]

You can set up a Common hop link that would typically redirect to your homepage or main sales page, and/or product-specific hop links that would typically redirect to your sales page for that product. The latter would also allow you to specify a product-specific Share % that would override your Common Share % for all referred sales of that product.



Bear in mind that you could create dummy products just to set up product-specific hop links for them that would redirect to strategic pages within your site; it does not matter whether buyers could directly purchase that product, or anything at all for that matter, on those landing pages. All affiliates who join your program would be able to obtain any/all links you offer.



When a buyer follows a hop link, we set a referral cookie in their browser which expires in 6 months and then redirect them to your landing page URL for that link. Regardless of which type of hop link a buyer follows, anything the buyer purchases from you during the lifespan of that referral cookie would earn the referring affiliate your product-specific % on any purchased items that have one or your Common % on all other purchased items.