Imagine a situation where you have a network of partner sites all pointing to your web site. By paying a commission based on sales, they have an incentive to drive traffic your way. The benefit is it costs you nothing unless real sales are generated. This is the concept of Affiliate Marketing (a source of visitors and sales. An Affiliate can be another web site that shows your banners, a search engine where you buy keywords, an email list, etc. Typical commissions pay based on clicks or sales generated.), and is used by all the major eCommerce web sites around the world. If you have ever considered paying for CPM banner advertising you will know how expensive it can be. Building a dedicated affiliate program effectively promotes your site at a cost that correlates to extra sales made.
Not just for Affiliates - monitor traffic and sales from incoming links
The Affiliate Tracking feature also monitors traffic and sales generated by specific incoming links. The affiliate tracking system also measures PPC campaigns running on different search engines. It allocates a tracked link to each campaign, allowing you to track sales and traffic. Our tracking system will measure the click and sale conversions from your PPC traffic, email campaigns, and more!
Exactly how does it work?
You can manually register the Affiliates, or they can register on the website. Once approved by the site owner, they are given access to a personalized Affiliate Console. This is where they can view their statistics and create product and banner URLs to paste in to their web site. These URLs contain Campaign AdCodes. When clicked by their site visitors, they are tracked by Spark Pay online stores and a cookie is set in their browser. The visitor is automatically forwarded by this URL to your web site - this can be any page on your web site. If the visitor makes a purchase within the cookie expiry period (defined by you), the sale is automatically tracked by our system as originating from the affiliate partner.
Spark Pay online stores offers a robust Affiliate Program. Advanced tracking and analysis is performed on every site visitor. Some of the features include:
- Web-based affiliate tracking system
- Track purchases made via your affiliates' web sites
- Know exactly how much traffic and sales are generated by incoming links to your site
- Sign up affiliate partners yourself, or let them apply automatically through your web site
- You define the life of the tracking cookie
- Select to pay either a per click, percentage or flat rate commission
- All new approved affiliates are automatically provided with necessary HTML code to place on their web site
- Provide "deep links" to any URL on your web site
- Secure password protected reporting area. where your affiliates can review their paid & unpaid commissions
- Advanced reporting and analysis console
Affiiliate specific discounts and promotions
You can offer special discounts and promotions to customers coming in from a specific Affiliate or AdCode. The discount system has options for these visitor sessions.
Powerful reporting
You have a complete affiliate administration area. It provides stats that go beyond the typical conversion rate calculations. Know your Sales Per Ad Dollar (SPAD. Amount of sales generated for every dollar spent in advertising. Sales / Ad Cost = SPAD), Cost Per Customer (CPC. The cost in advertising dollars spent for each customer gained by an AdCode. Sales / Ad Cost = CPC), and more! Drill down to each individual affiliate or Campaign AdCode. This information allows you to track the effectiveness of affiliate partners and individual campaigns. You can quickly see how much commission you owe to whom for any affiliate sales.
Affiliates sign up and manage their accounts at:
Affiliate Signup URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/store/affiliates/join/apply.aspx
Affiliate Console URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/store/affiliates
To Manage your list of affiliates as well as Add new ones, go to
Marketing > Affiliates in your admin.
For additional information on creating and managing affiliates, see this KB article here.