Affiliate tracking with a direct link to our site

[gravelld]

It looks like if I want to set up affiliate tracking, as a merchant, I have to give an E-Junkie link to my affiliates. This appears to set a cookie and then redirects to my merchant site so the customer can choose products and check out.



Is it possible to just have a direct link to our site, and maybe have the hop link in an iframe? I don't really want the E-Junkie URL to be seen, plus I'd rather have the SEO benefits of a direct link to my site.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Unfortunately, we have no way to track affiliate referrals through a link directly to your site; the referred buyer has to go through our affiliate Hop Link URL at some point to set a referral cookie that our system can track. However, if you'd prefer, affiliates can cloak their link URL with a link-shortener such as goo.gl, bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc. This help page explains how to obtain their bare referral link URL from the full Hop Link code we provide in our Affiliate Admin:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/tips.for-affiliates.link-url.htm



You may wish to set up an affiliate recruitment page on your site which explains all this (along with any other terms, banner images, etc. you may wish to provide), where you'd also put your actual E-junkie affiliate sign-up link. Then any other recruitment links you post elsewhere would just be a link to that page, and you can also enter that page as the More Information URL in your E-junkie affiliate program settings, so affiliates can find their way back to it from our Affiliate Admin easily.

[gravelld]

Thanks.



Wouldn't the IFrame trick set the cookie anyway, though?

[E-junkie_Monster]

If they've already arrived at your site it's pretty much too late to add any affiliate links. Each affiliate gets a unique link that's assigned to them from their own E-junkie account, you don't normally see those links and you wouldn't have any easy or foolproof way of adding the right one for the referring affiliate into an iframe on your own site to trigger the cookie before a purchase.

[gravelld]

Oh ok, I see.



In this case, this was going to be a closed "merchant managed" affiliate relationship between two parties. I was going to do all the registration of the affiliate myself, so I know what their IDs would be.



Maybe this isn't what you'd call affiliate marketing...

[E-junkie_Guru]

The iframe approach would not work reliably due to browser settings/extensions that may block third-party cookies.



If your objective is to calculate revenue sharing with a specific partner or supplier, this help page may interest you:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/tips.revenue.sharing.htm



It's also possible to set up Direct Links that work as a Buy Now button the affiliate could place on their own site, rather than redirecting potential buyers to yours. Each order placed through a Direct Link would calculate a commission earned by that affiliate for that sale, without setting a referral cookie for residual earnings on future purchases. For further details, see "6. Enable Product Direct Link" under the Product-Specific Affiliate Settings heading here:

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

[gravelld]

Yeah, I suppose that sounds more like what I'm trying to do (revenue sharing). But I only want to do it when someone is referred from the partner site. Can I pass a variable in the Buy Now button to set something I can use to work out the total value of referrals in the E-Junkie transactions log?



I also heard you can do the same thing for Paypal, so wondering if I should just do that...

[E-junkie_Guru]

In that case, you'd probably want to stick with our standard Hop Links. Since you'll have only the one affiliate, you could probably set up a redirection page or URL on your site that they could link to, which would in turn redirect to their Hop Link URL (in order to set the referral tracking cookie), which would in turn re-redirect to your sales page.



For simplicity, it would probably be best to set up a single Common Hop Link Landing Page URL (no need for product-specific link settings) with a Common Share set to whatever rate you'll share with this affiliate partner, and make sure you un-tick the option " List affiliate program details in E-junkie Marketplace and your E-junkie Shop". If you later decide to open up a broader affiliate program, you can change that Common Share % to something lower, and make up the difference for this initial affiliate by assigning them an Extra % in Seller Admin > View/Edit Affiliates.

[gravelld]

Ah yes, didn't think of that.



Thanks for the guidance.