Difference between revisions of "Quick-Start Guide"

Revision as of 14:07, 28 March 2012

Introduction

Offerit is an affiliate tracking solution that allows commission owners to easily track and integrate their offers or build an affiliate network. An offer can be anything from a lead, form, survey, product or service-- anything the commission wants to label as an offer that ends with a confirmation page. The process of an offer starts with a visitor viewing one of your affiliates web pages. A visitor clicks on an advertisement on an affiliate's page and is directed to a preview page of your offer known as a landing page. If the visitor decides to proceed past the landing page and complete the offer, a confirmation page signifying the offer is complete will be displayed to the visitor. Through the use of a tracking link (used by the affiliate) the source of the traffic is preserved along the way and the completed offer is tracked and credited to the affiliate in Offerit. This works because when the confirmation page is displayed to the visitor a tracking pixel is displayed, which triggers Offerit to create a customer record for that visitor and track the completed offer as a "sale".

Getting Started

Setting up all the steps in Offerit to start promoting Offers just requires these simple steps:

1. Add Offers
2. Set up Landing Page
3. Add Creatives
4. Affiliates setup their linkcodes
5. Set up conversion tracking on confirmation Page
6. Pay your affiliates (Commissions and Payments)

Add Offers

You can create new offers by going to the Offers Admin and click on the "Add Offer". Once created it will prompt you to enter details about the offer, the default landing page for the offer, geographic targetting for the offers and the marketing type. Once created, you can also edit your offers by clicking on the "Edit Offer details" in the Offers Admin.

• Offer Type - either a standard offer or an affiliate referral offer
• Offer Name - the name of your offer
• Short Name - this is used for short name style linkcodes
• Offer Launch - the date you would like your offers to launch
• Offer Response Type - the conversion tracking type you would like to use for this landing page: either Image Pixel, Iframe or Postback. You can find further details about this option below.

Create Landing Pages

You will be asked to specify the details of your default landing page when creating an offer, but you can also create additional landing pages for your offers by clicking on "Add New Landing Page" action icon in the Offers admin. Additional landing pages can be used for the purposes of variety, special promotions or any other reason, providing your affiliates with multiple ways to promote your offers. The required fields for creating a new landing page are:

• Landing Page Name - the name of your landing page
• Short name - this is used for short name style linkcodes
• url - this is the url for which your landing page is located
• tracking domain - this is the domain that is used for your linkcodes

Click "Save Changes" and your offer and its default landing page will be saved. Next, go back to the Offers Admin and click "Edit" next to the landing page for the offer you just created. This will allow you to set the offer revenue amounts for Initial Amount and Continuity Amount. This initial amount is the amount Offerit records for customer sales and continuity amount is the amount Offerit records for any repeat customer transactions. Next, set the "day" values for these fields to 0 (setting this to a nonzero value is optional functionality).

There are more advanced options you can configure when setting up your Offers and Landing pages which you can read about in this article: Offer & Landing Page Setup.

Affiliate Tracking (Linkcodes)

Linkcodes are tracking links that contain the offeritcode for a specific affiliate that can be used to direct visitors to your landing pages. They are the start of the tracking process for visitors that will lead them to completing one of your offers. Affiliates can view their own linkcodes from the main page of your Offerit and filter them based on the offer, a Commission that they are enrolled in and Languages for which the Landing Pages are available. After clicking "Apply Changes", a list of Landing Pages based on those filters will appear along with linkcodes for those landing pages.

Creatives

Creatives are advertising tools that affiliates can use to promote your offers on their web pages and can be managed in the the Creatives Admin. Affiliates can download creatives by clicking on the Creatives section of the Offerit affiliate main page. Corresponding to every creative is a linkcode that affiliates can use with the creative and within the linkcodes is tracking information about which creative the visitor clicked on. Every time a visitor to your offers clicks on a linkcode it counts as a page view for that affiliate and every time one is displayed it counts as an impression for the affiliate. There are multiple different types of creatives that affiliates can use to promote your offers including:

• Banners
• Downloadable and Embedded Videos
• Page Peel Ads and IM Popups
• Half/Full Page Ads
• Mailing Ads and Content Zips

Conversion Tracking

Offerit allows affiliates a variety of ways to promote your offers through the use of pixel tracking. Whenever a visitor clicks on a linkcode, placed on a page by an affiliate, the visitor's information such as which affiliate, commission, offers and landing page to use are stored in a cookie. This information is saved and will be available if the visitor completes the offer.

You can access these conversion links once an offer and its default landing page have been created by going to the Offers Admin, selecting the landing page for an offer and clicking on "Edit". These are some examples of what the different conversion tracking links will look like:

• iFrame

 <iframe src="http://example.offerit.com/signup/process_pixel.php?offerid=6" height=1 width=1></iframe>

• Image pixel

 <img src="http://example.offerit.com/signup/process_pixel.php?offerid=6" height=1 width=1/>

• Postback

 http://example.offerit.com/signup/process_pixel.php?offerid=6

For every offer you have, you will need one of these conversion links on the page where the visitor has completed the offers or sale. When the visitor loads a page with one of these links, the completed offers will be recorded in Offerit as a "sale". You can also record completed offers for visitors that did not go through a tracking link but this requires passing the transaction id with our process pixel script:

 http://example.offerit.com/signup/process_pixel.php?transid=

Commissions

The Commissions Admin is used to set up how you provide compensation to your affiliates. There multiple different ways you can choose to pay your affiliates:

• raw page view
• unique page view
• sale (flat rate and/or percentage)
• continuity (flat rate and/or percentage)
• CPM (1,000 impressions)

For more information on this, please see our article on Adding Commissions.

Payments

Within the Commissions Admin you will be able to manage how you pay your affiliates for the traffic they are sending to your offers. Once a day, payments will be calculated for your affiliates based on the commissions they are enrolled in and their payvia type (the method with which they have chosen to be paid). This will pause any additional payments from being added automatically by Offerit. Once stored, you can get a dump of these payments which can be used to export to other payment software to pay your affiliates.