Affiliate Tracking for sign-ups, Integration of 3rd party Affiliate scripts?
Hi folks,
I'm currently researching ways to implement an affiliate system for a site
goals:
- pay affiliates for user signups (lead generation - fixed amount per unique approved user)
- pay affiliates for completed sales (pay for performance)
(so all normal PayPerclick and PayPerVisit systems fail)
design/probs:
- it's a "consulting" site and so the sales are manually negotiated and performed via manual paypal payments...
- and therefore will have to be entered (in amount) manually into a system
- most affiliate scripts support that (the one that I have in mind is idevaffiliate, but any system is fine)
- I need a way to give out banners and links and track exactly where one new user signup came from
I think a profile-value would do fine, but I need the affiliate tracking software to plug it in there...
any experiences/ideas/suggestions?
any existing modules you already use for that?
any recommended 3rd party affiliate tracking system to use (should automatically handle affiliate payouts at least via paypal )
thanks
Christoph
Affiliate module
Note that I am aware of the module "affiliate" in contrib,
but that's just a very basic implementation lacking all the features that
"real" affiliates that drive a lot of traffic expect
FROM the readme
----
TO DO
- Track referrals with cookies, not just within a session. KO!
- Report on raw & unique clicks, signups, and sales by time period. KO!
- Affiliates can see reports of their affiliate activity KO!
- Affiliates can earn commissions based on sales to referred users. KO!
- Affiliates sessions allow automatic role_discount for ecomerce purchases
- Affiliates based links allow for affiliate theme to be presented
so it's not a problem buying industry strength affiliate
tracking system, but it's about integrating it into the drupal user management
spread-fire-fox-affiliates-module
I am also aware of the "spreadfirefox affiliate module" I found here
http://2bits.com/software/spread-fire-fox-affiliates-module.html#attachm...
but that's in fact only a referal tracking, they don't even put the affiliate reference into the user's account, not to speak of managing sales etc...
I'd recommend...
Hi Christoph,
Thanks for stopping by my site and alerting me about this thread.
I'm no drupal expert but most affiliate tracking systems are quite independent of the cms or ecommerce system you are using.
The main things you need are to track the incoming visitors as they land via the aff. links and then separately check at order commit time if they purchaser was related to an affiliate. A good system will have an affiliate panel for them to login and check their traffic, sales, etc. Reporting features can get quite extensive.
Tracking is usually done via cookies but more advanced systems have additional tracking like IP's etc. It's in the merchant's interest to keep the tracking as honest as possible, if they believe in the affiliate marketing concept and want to maximize their sales.
I'd suggest you look at the php/mysql scripts and get one that is customizable and also handles "promo" or "coupon" codes, so that you can handle the offline and manual entered orders you are talking about. I have several in-house script solutions listed on my site.
Regards,
Peter
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