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Using Affiliate Tracking on Your Site

Affiliate tracking is a great way to track sales via banner ads, print ads, or for a specific affiliate. You will determine which affiliate codes will be tracked. Then, you will simply append the code to your learning site's URL and tracking will commence.

For each purchase made on your learning site (via Stripe eCommerce), you will have a record of the affiliate code related to that specific purchase.

Where do I find this?

Reporting Hub > Library > Ecommerce > Content Transactions

How do I do this?

Creating Affiliate/Tracking Codes:

  1. First, select the page's URL
    Home Page - https://yourdomain.thoughtindustries.com
    Course Detail Page - https://yourdomain.thoughtindustries.com/courses/your-course-title
  2. If you are directing to the home page you will need to add /a/ to the URL (this is the affiliate extension). 
  3. For any other page, you will need to add ?utm_source=AFFILIATECODE to the end of the URL.  For example: 
    https://yourdomain.thoughtindustries.com/courses/your-course-title?utm_source=myaffiliatecode
  4. For each partner/ad you intend to make an affiliate referrer, you will need to add a unique code without any spaces (e.g., myaffiliatecode). Here are two examples of complete affiliate codes: 
    https://yourdomain.thoughtindustries.com/courses/your-course-title?utm_source=myaffiliatecode
    https://yourdomain.thoughtindustries.com/a/myaffiliatecode

    Tip

    To manage your affiliate codes, we recommend creating a spreadsheet of these URLs. They do not need to be setup in the Thought Industries platform.

  5. As users come in and make purchases from these URLs, they will be tracked in reports at Reporting Hub > Library > eCommerce > Content Transactions.

Distributing Affiliate Codes:

  1. It is recommended to test your URLs before they are distributed to ensure that they are functioning as expected.
  2. Once you have created and tested your URLs, they can simply be provided to your partners or added to your marketing campaigns for tracking.

Tracking Affiliate Sales:

  1. In the reporting area of your site you will find affiliate data within various purchase reports. For example, the Content Transaction report will show a list of ALL course sales. 
  2. On each line item, there is a field for the affiliate extension (e.g. myaffiliatecode). 

Note

We cache each affiliate / referrer code for 24 hours. If a learner happens to come to the learning site multiple times with different affiliate / referrer codes, the initial code would apply within 24 hours but the new code would apply anytime after the 24 hour window expires.

What else do I need to know?

  • No setup is required within the Thought Industries. You can append any series of characters/letters to the end of a URL and distribute that URL to potential learners. The affiliate code can be added to any URL on the learning site.

Tip

When creating URLs, it is best to avoid spaces and most special characters. Underscores and dashes, however, are commonly used and are very effective in taking the place of spaces.

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