Affiliate Program Overview
Overview
DAP’s built-in affiliate module makes every one of your members an affiliate by default.
You can have 1-tier or 2-tiers of commissions. Up to you.
If a user has an account in DAP (on your site), it means they have a User Id in the system, which means they are also instant and automatic affiliates – regardless of whether you actually choose to show them their affiliate link or not, regardless of whether you have set up commissions for products or not.
Now obviously, if you have not setup commissions for your Products, and are not showing them the affiliate details page, maybe because you’re not using DAP as your affiliate program manager, then of course they won’t get to see their affiliate link, which means they won’t be promoting your DAP affiliate link.
If you want to show them their affiliate link and other affiliate stats, then you simply need to create a “Affiliate Info” page (merge tags available).
If your site is YourSite.com , and if your member’s user id is 123, then their default affiliate link is:
http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=123
So basically, their user id (123) is also their affiliate id.
If you’re the DAP Admin, then your user id is probably 1. In which case, your own affiliate id for your site would then be:
http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=1
Affiliate Link With Custom Landing Page
If your affiliate (say, id #123) wishes to link to a specific page on your site, then this is what the link would look like:
http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=123&p=/custom-landing-page
Which is the same as…
http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=123&p=http://YourSite.com/custom-landing-page
Both of them will set the affiliate cookie for affiliate id #123, and then redirect the visitor to the landing page URL custom-landing-page, which is basically the same as http://YourSite.com/custom-landing-page
How The DAP Affiliate Program Works
- You first set up the commissions for each product on the Affiliates > Commissions page in your DAP Admin Dashboard.
- Your affiliate takes their affiliate link http://YourSite.com/dap/a/?a=123 and promotes it on their blog, web site, FaceBook, Twitter, etc.
- When prospect/visitor clicks on their affiliate link and arrives at your web site, a cookie gets set on the prospect’s computer with the affiliate’s id (123 in this example).
- The user then goes on to purchase a product from your web site.
- Immediately after purchase, they are redirected to the member’s area.
- At this time, the affiliate is instantly given credit for the new member referral. Please note that at this time, the only thing that is recorded by DAP, is that new member with user id 456 has been referred by affiliate 123. And if you have set up a “Pay Per Lead” commission, then it is instantly credited to the affiliate’s account. So if you had set up a “Pay Per Lead” of $1 per lead, then a sum of $1 is credited to affiliate 123’s account at this time.
- If the affiliate were to log in to their account at this time, they will only see the credit for the “Lead” and not (yet) for the Sale.
- Within an hour of the purchase, the DAP hourly cron job will run as usual (it runs at the top of every hour, 24 times a day).
- When this hourly cron job runs, it will carefully comb through all purchases made recently, for which there is a recorded affiliate, go and see what kind of commissions have been set up for this product, see if there are any special overrides for the referring affiliate, identify the right commission (Pay-per-sale fixed or Pay-per-sale percentage), and then at that time, the referring affiliate’s account will be “credited” with the actual commission for the sale, if any. So if the purchase was for $100, and you have set up a “Pay-Per-Sale” commission of 33%, then $33 is “credited” to the referring affiliate’s account.
- So if the affiliate were to view their affiliate info page, then they will see an new credit of $33 in their account.
Lifetime Affiliates
Once an affiliate is “tied” to a member’s account, that association is forever. And the member now forever belongs to this affiliate. So any future purchases made by this same member (using same account) will always result in commissions being credited to the same original affiliate, regardless of which other affiliate’s id they click on before making a purchase. See example below.
- Affiliate John refers customer Mary
- Mary buys, John gets affiliate commission
- A while (days, months or years) later, Mary clicks on a different affiliate link belonging to Paul
- Mary buys another product from your web site using the same email id as before
- John will still get the commission for the new product that Mary just bought, because John is the lifetime affiliate for Mary.
- So no matter how many times Mary makes a purchase, regardless of which affiliate link she used (even her own), John will get the commission every time, for life.
We have plenty more documentation available about our affiliate program. Check it out here: https://digitalaccesspass.com/doc/category/affiliates/
