We are going to start some affiliate campaigns for our website. I need to explain to our programmers who have not dealt with this type of campaign before what we need in terms of the administrative portion of our CMS to support the affiliate campaigns. So far I know that most of them are asking to put a "tracking pixel" on the confirmation page to report the sale and also the publisher who brought the customer there.
I want to know how all this works technically so I can explain it to our programmer. I want him to create a table in our CMS where I can assign a refer id for an affiliate, paste in their tracking pixel/script and indicate to our internal system what sort of deal is involved for this particular campaign. The object being to have only one landing page for all affiliate campaigns and one confirmation page. Based on the refer id in the url of the displayed shopping cart, the programmer could then put the appropriate pixel/script onto the confirmation page (if the customer purchases) which then reports back to the affiliate network.
What I need to know is how this actually happens. I believe we assign the refer id that we give to the Affiliate Network who then gives us the pixel/script for the confirmation page. Then I get fuzzy! I assume the affiliate network has gazillion pixel/image file names on their server so that when a request comes in for the one that they gave us they know what campaign just converted...is that correct? Does the url go back to the affiliate networks' server along with the image request so they have the publisher info? Does our programmer have to take the complete refer id and pub id from the shopping cart url and append it to the comfirmation page url or does that happen automatically somehow? Sorry to be such a newbie but I gotta start somewhere!!:costumed-smiley-015
I've seen a url that contained the refer id plus some other info that I think is the publishers id but I don't know how that gets from the shopping cart page to the confirmation page and how the affiliate knows all this. I have to explain this to my programmer so he knows how to set this up, both our table in our CMS and in the code itself to properly report everything back to the affiliate network.
I would really appreciate a detailed discussion of how all this works. If anyone here can tell me all this or could point me to a discussion of this on the web somewhere I would really appreciate it!
I want to know how all this works technically so I can explain it to our programmer. I want him to create a table in our CMS where I can assign a refer id for an affiliate, paste in their tracking pixel/script and indicate to our internal system what sort of deal is involved for this particular campaign. The object being to have only one landing page for all affiliate campaigns and one confirmation page. Based on the refer id in the url of the displayed shopping cart, the programmer could then put the appropriate pixel/script onto the confirmation page (if the customer purchases) which then reports back to the affiliate network.
What I need to know is how this actually happens. I believe we assign the refer id that we give to the Affiliate Network who then gives us the pixel/script for the confirmation page. Then I get fuzzy! I assume the affiliate network has gazillion pixel/image file names on their server so that when a request comes in for the one that they gave us they know what campaign just converted...is that correct? Does the url go back to the affiliate networks' server along with the image request so they have the publisher info? Does our programmer have to take the complete refer id and pub id from the shopping cart url and append it to the comfirmation page url or does that happen automatically somehow? Sorry to be such a newbie but I gotta start somewhere!!:costumed-smiley-015
I've seen a url that contained the refer id plus some other info that I think is the publishers id but I don't know how that gets from the shopping cart page to the confirmation page and how the affiliate knows all this. I have to explain this to my programmer so he knows how to set this up, both our table in our CMS and in the code itself to properly report everything back to the affiliate network.
I would really appreciate a detailed discussion of how all this works. If anyone here can tell me all this or could point me to a discussion of this on the web somewhere I would really appreciate it!