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I have just recently installed WP Affiliate Platform and in the process of getting things setup. I would like any guidance possible for best setup.
Current version of wordpress installed on the host system is 3.3.1
website: http://www.thenaturalcookstudio.com
This is a culinary school and we are setting up a new affiliate program for health related businesses to be able to refer their clients to the school to take a particular class called the Main Course.
The website does not use a shopping cart. Instead the prospective student can sign-up for the class through the website using a Contact Form 7 registration page which emails the information to office@thenaturalcookstudio.com email address. When choosing payment, they can select paypal (uses a paypal plugin), or by phone or by sending in a check.
We would like to award the affiliate with the commission only after the student has taken the class, but track as soon as they register.
Questions:
1) How is it best to set-up the tracking so that it tracks a sale to the affiliate after the student completes the registration page?
2) In some cases the prospective student will go through the affiliates website, and in some cases the prospective student may go directly to the school website. When they go directly to the school website, they will have an affiliate id printed on a card that could be entered/selected from a dropdown list. Is it possible to automate a sale/tracking for those coming directly into the school website?
I’m sure I’ll have more questions as I work through this. Any help on these questions and suggestions in general in getting started would be greatly appreciated.
Hi, The only way the Affiliate plugin will be able to automatically track all sales is if the plugin is integrated with one of the following ecommerce plugins/solutions listed under the “Integration Options” section of the documentation:
http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-affiliate/
In your case, you will have a mixture of online and offline payment so my recommendation would to do the following:
1. Use the Contact Form 7 lead capture option so that every time a student fills out the registration form the affiliate plugin keeps track of who referred that student:
2. After a student finalizes the payment (online or offline), you can go to the “Leads Menu” of the affiliate dashboard and find that particular student’s record and hit the “Award” link to award the commission to the appropriate affiliate for that referral.
I followed the directions turning on Contact 7 lead capture. Below is what I get in the debug log when running a test. However, nothing is showing up in the Manage Leads page when I look there.
[05/02/2012 5:51 PM] – SUCCESS :Contact Form 7 lead capture feature is enabled. Checking details…
[05/02/2012 5:51 PM] – SUCCESS :Contact Form 7 lead capture data. Name: Kelly Worrell | Email: kworre@hotmail.com | Affiliate ID: kelly | Contact Form Reference ID: 687
[05/02/2012 5:51 PM] – SUCCESS :Capturing lead with the name. Name: Kelly Worrell
[05/02/2012 5:51 PM] – SUCCESS :Lead captured in the leads database table. Lead email: kworre@hotmail.com
Any guidance as to what I might be doing wrong/best way to test? I am running the test by setting myself up with an affiliate ID, then setting up a page in my current WP website to embed my affiliate banner, selecting the banner link and then registering myself for a class which calls the Contact Form 7 form to register.
Here is a more complete list of information in the debug log after several more attempts. Does the Enable Remote Post setting need to be enabled? I’m confused as to why the messages would indicate that the leads were updated in the leads database, but not show up in the Leads Management screen.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
[05/03/2012 2:28 AM] – SUCCESS :Contact Form 7 lead capture feature is enabled. Checking details…
[05/03/2012 2:28 AM] – SUCCESS :Contact Form 7 lead capture data. Name: Kelly Worrell | Email: kworre@hotmail.com | Affiliate ID: kelly | Contact Form Reference ID: 687
[05/03/2012 2:28 AM] – SUCCESS :Capturing lead with the name. Name: Kelly Worrell
[05/03/2012 2:28 AM] – SUCCESS :Lead captured in the leads database table. Lead email: kworre@hotmail.com
The leads are being captured but it is failing to insert the data in the database. Can you please do the following (it should adjust the database columns and fix the issue):
https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/re-install-or-load-a-fresh-build-of-the-plugins
Thank you for your help, the leads are now capturing correctly.
Another question, now that I am capturing the leads. Once the lead has led to a student taking a class/money in pocket,how do you award the affiliate the commision? I click on the award button and nothing seems to happen. I would have expected an entry to be placed in the Sales / Commission area and available for payment, but it is not showing up. No additional information is in the debug log.
Also, with a lead is the affilaite view supposed to show the referal? Nothing is showing up there from the click over.
The referal clicks eventually showed up in the Affiliate view. Could there be a delay in the posting?
I still have the question about how to award the affiliate based on the lead. The Award button on Leads Management page does not seem to be working?
When you click on the Award button, look for an “Award Commission” section that shows up near the top of that menu page. You just have to enter how much the sales value was and then it will calculate the commission based on that value and award it to the appropriate affiliate.
A few additional questions.
1) Is it possible to add a custom field to the affiliate details? I would like to capture a choice for the affiliate to recieve thier commission. The choices are for them to: A. recieve the payment directly, B. Donate the value to a scholarship fund, or C. receive 1/2 of the commission directly as payment and donate the other 1/2 to a scholarship fund. Ideally, they could enter their choice when signing up as an affiliate. I could then use that information to control the amount of commission due them for payment and deposit the rest to a scholarship fund.
2) Is it possible to add a custom field to the Leads details? I would like to capture the specific class that the person is signing up for as a part of the details. Currently, we use a single Contact 7 Form for all classes, and only want to pay commissions on some of those.
3) Is there an API call that I can use to conditionally make the call to insert a lead? In a case where the lead is coming in directly (not going through the affiliates webisite), I would like to allow them to choose from a list the affiliate id in the form. If they choose an affiliate Id, I would like to insert a transaction into the leads table for the choosen affiliate.
Additional question:
4) When I create an ad/banner to make the code snippett available to the affiliates, for some reason the code does not include the domain/url info back to the site. Below is an example of what displays as the code in the affiliate view. Notice that the http:/www.thenaturalcookstudio.com/ is not included. What should I do to make sure that it is a complete code for the affliate to embed in their website?
A little more feedback on the ad code challenge. It works fine if the target URL is the root/home page. If the target URL is a specific product it does not insert the root domain into the code.
Example:
Target URL: http://www.thenaturalcookstudio.com —- this one works
Tartget URL: http://www.thenaturalcookstudio.com/classes/the-main-course – does not work
code results: href=”/classes/the-main-course/?ap_id=kelly”
The banner link is correct, but not sure the generated code is.
Banner Link: http://www.thenaturalcookstudio.com/classes/the-main-course/?ap_id=kelly
1) No, there is no custom field option. You can use one of the unused fields to store some custom data but thats about it.
2) No, it cannot store custom field with leads data.
3) Yes, there is an API to capture lead from your own script or code. Contact us using the contact form and I will give you details.
4) This usually happens when you don’t use the “http” keyword in the URL value that you are entering in the “Target URL” field. Edit the banner and check the value in the “Target URL” field. Does it have the “http” keyword?
Thank you for the information, I will request the API code through the contact form.
Yes, I have the http keyword in the Target URL field.
Target URL: http://www.thenaturalcookstudio.com/classes/the-main-course/
The code in the affiliate view shows up as: href=”/classes/the-main-course/?ap_id=kelly”
Kelly
You had the following plugin active which is doing some replacements and messing up your URL value when the data is retrieved from the database.
WP RegEx ReplaceThis plugin has the following description and I knew from the description that it is messing up the output values (not a good idea to use plugins like that unless it is implemented in a way that won’t affect other plugin’s output):
This plugin will replace regular expressions in the final rendered WordPress output.
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