Creating Pass Thru Affiilate Links for External Site

[amin007]

Note: This topic is suited more for slightly advanced users. This kind of setup is not really standard practice so you shouldn’t need to use this on a normal site.

When You Might Need This?

Say for example, you have a video on an external site where you want your affiliates to send the traffic. After the visitor watch the video he/she can come to your site and make a purchase.

Since the affiliate sent the traffic to an external site the affiliate plugin has no way of tracking the cookie to determine who sent the visitor. To get around this issue you can create pass thru affiliate link.

Creating Pass Thru Links

Pass thru links are links that point to your site but automatically redirects the user to the target page after it sets the cookie and tracks the click on your domain. As far as your visitors are concerned they don’t see any difference. They click on an affiliate link and they land on your video page on an external site (the cooking setting, click tracking and redirection happens in one go).

WP Affiliate Platform allows you to do this. So for example your external video page is at the following URL:

www.example.com/myvideo

so a pass thru link will be like the following:

www.your-domain.com/?wpap_pass_thru=http://www.example.com/myvideo&ap_id=tips21

OR the following:

www.your-domain.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-affiliate-platform/api/redirect.php?url=http://www.example.com/myvideo&ap_id=tips21

This will track the click for the affiliate whose ID id “tips21” then redirect the user to the “www.example.com/myvideo” page. If the visitor then comes back to your site later and makes a purchase the commission will be awarded to the affiliate whose ID is “tips21” as the cookie is already set.

You can of-course use a TinyURL or link shortener service to make the pass through link look short and clean.

[Jakey]

Hi,

Would it be possible to add another parameter to the affiliate link and track it on the backend?

Say http://example.com/?ap_id=aff-id&subid=aff-subid

So then the affiliate can track which click or link led to the sale.

Thanks!

Jake

[amin007]

There is no option build in the plugin for this so you will have to manully teak the code. This sounds like a good idea though so I will put it on my to do list.

You can however make multiple affiliate accounts to track different campaigns (This will become painful if you have too many campaigns though)

[pwidder]

I tried using the pass through code as per above

With these parameters

[http://www.alrodee.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-affiliate-platform/api/redirect.php?url=www.bephobiafree.com&ap_id=pwidder]

This is url that shows in the address bar

[http://www.alrodee.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-affiliate-platform/api/www.bephobiafree.com]

and I end up on and 404 error page on the host site.

Is there an error in my code?

[amin007]

In the URL parameter you don’t have “http” so it’s not doing the redirection properly. try the following:

[http://www.alrodee.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-affiliate-platform/api/redirect.php?url=http://www.bephobiafree.com&ap_id=pwidder]

[wzp]

I think he was imitating the example given at the top of this thread, that did not contain the http part 8(

[amin007]

What? The example missing the “http”? I don’t see it.. what are you going on about?

Thanks for pointing it out… I corrected the example.

[Jakey]

Hey Amin,

I hope all is going well.

Any chance you were able to add the ability to pass an additional parameter yet?

Thanks!

Jake

[amin007]

I looked into this but then I realized that there is no database column to store this info so it turned out to be not so straight forward.

Anyway, I still want to add this feature and this is the rough sketch.

When this additional parameter is set it will store the value in a field called “Custom Tracking” and will display this information under the “Referrals” menu. Will this work?

[Jakey]

Hi Amin,

Yes that sounds like it would work. How would the subid be passed in the URL?

&referral=subid ?

Thank you for taking a look at it. I really appreciate it!

Jake

[amin007]

I am halfway there I decided to track this field for the sales data too so you can measure the conversion rate so it’s taking extra time.

[Jakey]

Thank you soooooo much! I really appreciate it!

[Stiddy]

Wanting to do this but offer the links in the affiliate ads area. Is it possible to use a plugin like “page-links-to” to do the redirect? That is, create a dummy post on the site where the affiliate program resides then have “page-links-to” redirect to the external site?

In my situation I am actually putting my affiliate plugin on a sub-site of the main WP site because the plugin conflicts with the theme I am using. So, I have a WPMU set up with the main site having the content and the subsite having the payment gateway. In the payment site I have WP E-store and wp-affiliate running. Can I send people to the main site with the normal affiliate code, or do I have to redirect through the sub-site? To be clear, the affiliate plugin is not activated on the main site. It is activated on the sub-site but the plugin files are in the normal plugins folder for the whole site.

The “page-links-to” plugin sounds like an easy fix and I could use it for any redirect. Let me know if you think it will work.

Thanks for the help.

[amin007]

You need to use the site that have the Affiliate plugin installed. Basically it needs a link to the “redirect.php” script that comes with the affiliate plugin.

[Stiddy]

As I understand it, the redirect link has to be done on a case by case basis, right? I can’t have it in the manage ads section with automatic affiliate code insertion. Is this correct?

[Author]

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