What is an affiliate program?
We are often asked about the affiliate program, so we decided to elaborate on that issue listing basic facts on affiliate marketing as it might come useful for a daily deal site.
Affiliates are people, who promote your site, and you pay them for their efforts. The amount you pay them depends directly on how many business they generated i.e. how many purchases were made due to their efforts.
How do we know which purchases are those? Affiliate (a person/company) is assigned and provided with a unique ID, which must appear in the affiliate/referral links they are using to promote your site e.g. http://dailydealsite.com/referred_by=1111, where 1111 is the unique ID of the affiliate. So when people follow this link and make the purchase on your site this affiliate ID is taken from the URL and related to this purchase, so the system knows this purchase was made due to this exact affiliate and then either are fixed payment or percentage from sales will be given to the affiliate.
If Getsocio referral program doesn't quite cut your viral marketing needs, you can easily use a 3rd party affiliate tracking software by simply adding a tracking code they provide to "Thanks for your order" page on your Getsocio site.
What the tracking code is for? The tracking code is used to send the information about the order placed on your site to 3d party affiliate tracking software. This code (usually an iframe) is added to "order created" page on your Getsocio site (this is the page users see having made the purchase). This code is always provided by the affiliate service as it should have some specific format for their system to be able to analyze it, to retrieve the affiliate ID and the information on order (e.g. price, quantity, amount paid, customer name if needed) and present it to you for you to know about the sales generated by every affiliate and reimburse them. Some affiliate tracking software can have integration with PayPal or other payment systems, allowing you to pay the affiliates right from there.
