Via affiliate referral links
When your affiliates sign-up for your program, they automatically have access, in their affiliate account, to a unique referral link that they can use to promote your business.
When a visitor clicks one of your affiliates’ referral links, they will be redirected to your website, where a tracking first-party cookie will be set in the visitors browser. A referral visit will also be created by SliceWP, which you can see in your WordPress admin dashboard > SliceWP > Visits.
By default, the tracking cookie will be active for 30 days. However, if you wish to change the number of days the tracking cookie remains active, you can do so by changing the Tracking Cookie Duration option from SliceWP > Settings.
While the tracking cookie is active, if this referred visitor makes a purchase from your website, the affiliate that referred this visitor will be rewarded a commission based on the commission settings you’ve set. This will happen for subsequent purchases until the cookie expires.
After visiting your website through a referral link, you may notice that the referral data in the link disappears when navigating to another page. This is completely normal, as the referral information is stored in the tracking cookie, so it continues to be tracked behind the scenes even though it’s no longer visible in the link.
Affiliate attribution
A big question arises when a visitor firstly clicks on an affiliate referral link and then clicks on another affiliate’s referral link. Which affiliate gets rewarded?
By default, SliceWP will credit the last affiliate, meaning the affiliate whose link was clicked last. However, you can change this to first affiliate, meaning the affiliate whose link was clicked first.
You can change which scenario you prefer, by setting the “Credit First/Last Affiliate” option from SliceWP > Settings > General (tab) > Affiliate URL Settings (section).
To illustrate exactly how the system works in these two cases, let’s consider the following example. Let’s say you have two affiliates, Alexis and Dan, and that you wish to credit the last affiliate.
Last affiliate
In this case, when a visitor clicks Alexis’ referral link, the tracking cookie is set in the visitor’s browser and a referral visit is recorded in SliceWP.
If this visitor then clicks on Dan’s link, while the tracking cookie with Alexis’ data is active, because you have “last affiliate” set, the existing tracking cookie will be deleted and a new one, with Dan’s data, will be set. Alongside the new cookie, a new referral visit is recorded in SliceWP.
If the visitor makes a purchase while the cookie is active, because the cookie contains Dan’s data, Dan will be rewarded a commission.
First affiliate
Now, let’s say that you want to reward the first affiliate. Again, similar to the previous case, when a visitor clicks Alexis’ referral link, the tracking cookie is set in the visitor’s browser and a referral visit is recorded in SliceWP.
However, if this visitor then clicks on Dan’s link, the existing cookie will not get modified. Alexis’ data will continue to be stored in the cookie until the cookie expires. Only once this cookie expires, a new one can be set by clicking on another affiliate’s referral link.
Similar to the to the previous case, if the visitor makes a purchase while the cookie is active, because the cookie contains Alexis’ data, Alexis will be rewarded a commission.
Via affiliate coupons
In addition to referral links, you can use coupon/discount codes to track affiliate referrals and to reward your affiliates with commissions.
With the Affiliate Coupons add-on you can link coupon codes to specific affiliates. Whenever one of these coupons is used on checkout, the linked affiliate will be rewarded a commission.
Please note: this functionality is available only with SliceWP Pro installed.
For example, let’s say that you have an affiliate, named Dan, that you link to a 10% coupon code, “dan_10_percent”. Let’s also consider that Dan’s commission rate is 25%.
Dan goes ahead and promotes this coupon to their audience, and one of Dan’s followers uses the “dan_10_percent” coupon code to purchase a $100 product from you.
The customer will benefit from a 10% discount, while your affiliate, Dan, will receive a commission based on the discounted value paid by the customer.
To showcase this in numbers, the customer will pay $90, as they have a 10% discount, while Dan will get $22.50, which is 25% of the $90 paid by the customer.
Important note: The commission that’s rewarded to your affiliate is calculated on the discounted amount, not the product’s price.
Affiliate attribution
You might be wondering what happens when a referral link is used together with a coupon code, especially when the referral link is from an affiliate, while the coupon code is linked to another affiliate.
The answer is, a single commission is generated and it’s rewarded to the affiliate that is linked to the coupon code.
What happens when multiple affiliate coupons are used on checkout?
If the eCommerce plugin you’re using to power your business allows customers to apply multiple coupons on checkout, then customers can also add multiple affiliate coupons.
In this case, only the first affiliate coupon that’s applied will be taken into account and the affiliate that is linked to this coupon will be rewarded the commission. The other affiliate coupons will not generate commissions for the linked affiliates.
Can affiliate coupons be applied with regular coupons?
Yes. If the eCommerce plugin you’re using to power your business allows customers to apply multiple coupons on checkout, then customers can add regular coupons alongside affiliate coupons.
The affiliate will be rewarded based on the final discounted amount, after the discounts from all applied coupons are subtracted from the cart price.