How to set up your affiliate program with Affiliatly
To get you started easily, we've created a step-by-step setup for you. Click on the Setup tab in your admin panel and follow the 10 steps to successfully set up your affiliate program with Affiliatly.
However, we understand that setting up your affiliate marketing program may be a totally new adventure for you and in order to make sure you have all the information you need we're presenting this article with extended details about each step.
So here's the list as you see it at the Setup tab. Let's go over it one by one:
Complete Quickstart Setup
The quickstart setup aims to cover the essential configurations that are needed from the side of the Affiliatly admin panel. In most of the fields on the steps you'll have a help tooltip available with useful information you'll want to make good use of.
The first step, confirms the URL of your store and the selection of the tracking methods you'll get started with.
The second step covers the configuration of the cookies used to track and the base commissions for each of the tracking methods you selected previously.
The third step focuses on the configurations related to payments and the registration form for the affiliates to join your program.
Integration
This is potentially the most critical step of the process as it's the one that confirms the connection with the Affiliatly platform and your store to make sure that all of these features and configuration are effectively working towards the success of your affiliate program.
For this reason we're going to focus a little more on this one.
Note: if you have a Shopify, BigCommerce or Ecwid store you won't need to worry about the first bullet point that informs about setting up the integration because it's done automatically.
Nevertheless, we strongly recommend that you perform test the integration as shown on the rest of the bullet points.
Performing the integration (first bullet point)
We understand that this may become the tricky part to non tech users. So just in case that the information you'll find on the integration tab doesn't seems enough for you, we've dedicated to build some complete guides to aid you on every step of the process here.
Testing the integration (rest of the bullet points)
In order to test the integration you could go back to Affiliatly's "Integration" tab, look for the test URL that will be shown for your store and click to make a test visit. You can notice that the test URL it's the same as your store but adding a "?aff=1" at the end.
After visiting the test link, if you go to the "Dashboard" tab on Affiliatly, you will notice that the visits total was increased.
Tracking Methods
This step is mostly an invitation to recheck the configuration of the tracking methods you took care of at step 1 with the Quick Start setup just in case there's anything else you'd like to change.
Once you go to Settings->Tracking you'll see this list of Tracking methods and you can enter to their individual settings by clicking on the button that's next to the right of each of them.
The references mentioned for Tracking affiliates & Commissions cover everything you might need.
Affiliate Registration
Here you'll focus on defining all the details related to the registration form that your affiliates will fill when signing up to your affiliate marketing program.
You will see the URL to your registration form so you can publish your link on your website and social media profiles for the people interested.
Depending on the needs of your business or maybe the information required by other marketing tools like Google Analytics you may want to customize what information you need from your affiliates aside of their name and email. So these options will allow you to pick the exact fields you need.
The third point is extremely important as it shows you where to add the legal agreement with the terms and conditions that would reign over your affiliate marketing program to avoid any undesired situations.
The last bullet point is focused on how to embed the form at your site in case you want to go beyond just sharing a link and want people to actually see the form inside your site. There are two options:
Form only will just display the information fields required to register
Whole page with banner and text will display all the additional customizations that you may have added to attract affiliates.
You can also find an additional reference to add the form to a custom page on your store here.
Payment Settings
We're doing great so far! Affiliates have all the basic settings to allow them to do their job. But after they do, we need to pay them.
As the owner of the affiliate marketing program, we understand that you won't want to bother on processing every single commission an affiliate earns one by one, spending a lot of time and money in transaction fees. For this reason, the "Default minimum payout" lets you define what's the lowest amount of money an affiliate must have for his payment to be processed.
The next setting is quite simple as you just need to check the payment methods you are capable of using when paying the affiliates.
As for making the payment we're going to insist on the great advice it's shown there: learn more on that over here 👉 How to pay affiliates
Affiliates, Orders & Creatives
Now that we have taken care of the main structure of your program we're going to start to make adjustments to fit best your needs.
The first part invites you to make custom configurations on top of your base program settings aiming to give a different treatment to specific affiliates. This helps covering the case of special deals you may have done with some relative, influencer or agency.
Next, is just a small heads up on how could you check and edit details on orders for you to keep it in mind when needed. As you're launching your program you probably don't need it at the moment but be certain you'll get there as orders come.
The third part about creatives, reminds you that you have the ability to upload to the platform the marketing assets you'd like to provide to incentivize the amount, style and consistency of the online publications made by your affiliates. This is totally recommended.
These are the options you will find when going to the creatives tab and clicking on the Add+ button.
Of course, you can find an extra reference at How to set up creatives.
Look & Feel
You're here for a reason and just in case you'd like a confirmation: yes, customizing everything according to your brand identity and business stile is really important for the perception that people have about your business and that does include the affiliates that would be participating on your program.
Under Settings > Customization > Look & Feel you will have options to hide the Affiliatly logo, customize font, colors and upload your own logo so everything matches your business.
All of these options are covered in How to customize the design of Affiliatly
Email Templates
On a day to day basis you will be focused in growing your business and your affiliates will be focused on generating traffic and revenue. To keep track of activities Affiliatly offers you a wide selection of options to trigger notifications to your affiliates and to you.
The top options are for the affiliates to know how well are they performing and in the bottom, you can mark to receive emails about new affiliates and the moment when an affiliate has reached the minimum amount of earnings you set at step 1 so it's time to process the payment.
Advanced Settings
This is the section for the final tweaks of this guide. We're going to cover some important settings that are worth mentioning at this stage.
The IP and email block makes that you no longer are tracked when performing tests which means that your stats won't be altered unless the real referred visits and test purchases are happening.
Expand your knowledge about this situation by checking Why are orders connected with an incorrect affiliate?
The default order status can be set by choosing between unpaid, paid and "store status". The last one will import the status from your store.
Please check our article What does 'Default order status' mean?
The tax exclusion is an option available in the rare case that your store doesn't excludes it by default. If that happens you can also exclude it through this setting.
Knowledge Base
Well, this is the most important invitation of all the ten steps. Our knowledge base is constantly growing and receiving love to make sure you get all the answers you may need.
So please make sure to visit the knowledge base here and add it to your bookmarks.
Once you've passed all these 10 steps you can feel confident that you have all you need to run a successful affiliate marketing program using Affiliatly. The next thing to do would be to start sharing your registration link on your website and your social media profiles to start recruiting affiliates.
In case of any questions, you can always contact our support team for further assistance. We're happy to help!