Tips on our New Interface
By Will Charland, Affiliate Manager
If you have logged into your account recently, you probably noticed that the affiliate.com interface has received a facelift. While the functionality remains essentially the same, I wanted to give you a few tips on getting the most out of the interface’s new look and feel.
Searching Offers
When browsing for an offer, the quickest way to find what you are looking for is to use the ‘Keyword Search’. If you’re looking for the newest offers, click on the “Offers” tab, click on “Search Offers” and filter by “Recency”. In “Search Offers” you can also search by minimum threshold, specific country or category, to narrow down your results.
Select Offers
‘Select’ offers are a relatively new concept with affiliate.com. We created this new offer description so affiliates are able to view all the offers we have in the network, including those that were previously labeled ‘Private’. Similar to ‘Private’ offers, affiliates must get authorization to run ‘Select’ offers. Be sure the offer you apply for accepts the kind of traffic you plan on driving. To expedite the approval process, send your affiliate manager an email letting them know what offer you have applied for and the type of traffic you plan on running.
Pixel Placement
DirectTrack allows publishers to place their own third-party pixels. This can be a huge help if your affiliate manager is not readily available, (say at 3:30 am mountain time) when you are ready to start your campaign. This can be a big advantage whether you are in a different time zone or just like to work on your affiliate programs late at night. If this option isn’t already available to you, ask your affiliate manager to activate this capability for you. Please note that not all advertisers allow third-party pixels, so the option may not be available for certain offers. Check with your affiliate manager if you have questions about a specific offer.
When placing a third-party pixel, DirectTrack works best with non-secure image pixels. This piggy-backs your pixel to the DT pixel, and means that every time the DT pixel fires, yours will fire as well. DT can also support iframe, script and postback options. Any javascript must be placed on the advertiser page directly. The nature of any script is that it fires in the order in which it was placed. If your script pixel is placed behind a script that is improperly placed, it may not fire properly.
Tracking Subids
If you choose not to place a third party pixel, you can track subids through the affiliate.com system. There are a few different ways to do this. To track your subids in the “Get Subid Stats” options, append “&subid1=” to the end of the link. You can add up to 5 subids per link by adding them in sequential order. (“&subid1=red&subid2=blue&subid3=green” etc.) To view your subid stats, go to “Overall Stats”, select “Get Subid Stats”, then select the date, keyword filter, or quantity of subids you wish to view, and click on the “Display Stats” button. This will show subids related to your leads and clicks.
If you are trying to track subids through your contextual link, you can do so by simply applying the subid directly to the end of the contextual link (“login.tracking101.com/sw/675/CD36753/red_blue_” etc.). You can view this report in “Overall Stats”. Choose the campaign and date range, and click on “Download Optional Info”. It will generate a CSV file with only your lead subids (contextual links don’t track clicks).
These are just a few tips to get the most out of our tracking system. I encourage you to use all these functions and give us feedback on what else you would like to see in our network.
