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Using Affiliate Tracking on Your Site

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  2. Use Case Information
  3. Creating Codes
  4. Distributing Codes
  5. Reporting

 

Affiliate tracking is a great way to track sales via banner ads, print ads, or for a specific affiliate. It's as simple as deciding you want an affiliate code to be tracked, then, append the code to your learning site's URL.

Use Case Information

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.

When configured you can control the following:

Track Sales with Affiliate Codes

  • Append URLs to have affiliate codes
  • Allow marketing partners to have a trackable impact on your site sales
  • Track codes used and report on marketing efforts via reports in Thought Industries

Creating Affiliate Codes:

No setup is required within 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.

  1. First, select the page's URL where you will lead learners. For example:
    • 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). For example: 
    https://yourdomain.thoughtindustries.com/a/myaffiliatecode
  3. For any other page, you will need to add ?utm_source=AFFILIATECODE or &utm_source=AFFILIATECODE to the end of the URL.  For example: 
    https://yourdomain.thoughtindustries.com/courses/your-course-title?utm_source=myaffiliatecode

    Note

    If your base URL already has a question mark character, you will use an ampersand character instead of a question mark when appending the URL with the affiliate code. For example: 

    https://yourdomain.thoughtindustries.com/courses/your-course-title?courseid=12345&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).

    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.

    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.

Distributing Affiliate Codes:

It is recommended to test your URLs before they are distributed to ensure that they are functioning as expected.

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:

In Reporting Hub, you will find affiliate data within various purchase reports. Look for the field Affiliate - the values in this field will display the affiliate code used in the transaction. This is how to track if a purchase was referred from somewhere else.

The Content Transactions Log is a good place to start since it has a record of all content sales. To view the Content Transaction Log, go to Reporting > Reports > Ecommerce > Content Transactions Log.

Note

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

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