I would like to open discussion about splitting of commissions between more affiliates.
Current situation in affiliate softwares (including Post Affiliate Pro)
- if customer is referred by more than one affiliate, you need to decide if first or last affiliate will receive commissions
- often merchant is contacted by affiliate, that he has feeling, that commissions should be assigned to him, because he was in contact with customer .... examination of transaction shows, that commission was assigned to another affiliate (e.g. he referred customer sooner)
In current situation needs merchant to decide, if first or last affiliate will receive commissions (It is basic setup of cookie overwriting in Configuration menu of Merchant panel).
Still there is question, what is more fair.
Should receive commissions first affiliate, because he was first, who introduced your product to visitor?
Or should receive commissions last affiliate, because he persuade visitor to buy it?
Biggest question is what to do with affiliates, which referred customer to your site, but were not first and not last ... they referred customer somewhere in the middle of decision process, but they receive no commissions currently.
Our current situation
In Quality Unit's affiliate program we defined, that always first affiliate will receive commissions, but we feel every day more and more, that we should divide commissions between all referring affiliates.
Not just first, not just last, but really ALL.
Our suggestion
- We will track in transaction all affiliates
- Merchant will be able to define bonus X% for first affiliate and bonus Y% for last affiliate from commission
- All affiliates, which referred this transaction will receive rest of commissions divided by number of affiliates.
Example:
- First affiliate will have bonus 20%
- Last Affiliate will have bonus 20%
- Together was sale referred by 10 different affiliates
Commission will be computed in following way:
- All Affiliates referring this transaction will receive: (100 - 20 - 20)% / number of affiliates = 6%
- First Affiliate will receive 6% + bonus 20% = 26%
- Last Affiliate will receive 6% + bonus 20% = 26%
Do you feel it is interesting feature? Should we invest our development resources into this feature?
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[...] our development resources into this feature ? You can post your opinion also in our blog: Quality Unit Blog - Affiliate Marketing Blog Archive Split commissions Thank you very much, we would like to drive development of our product with feedback of real [...]
Very interesting concept...it would be great to allow the option of splitting commissions. Once I figure out how to use the program I could see running a test to see which keeps affiliates happier. Currently I prefer, and hope I can set the program, to give the entire commission to the last affiliate...that is, the one that actually got the customer to make the sale. As an aside...anyone out there using the program that's willing to help us get ours properly installed for a fee?, please let us know. Regards, Scotty
thx. for your feedback. Yes, it is question, what is more fair, if last or first concept. Both are possible now with PAP4, but we think, that really fair it will be, if all referring affiliates will receive something from sale. If you need help with setup of affiliate program, just contact our support - our support crew can do this task for you. e.g. Installation on your server is for free and if you will need full integration and setup, we charge for this $199
Oh ... this is a greate Idea. My Idea some years ago, when I started, was: - The "first" affiliate will ever be the one, who "brought the customer in". - The "actual" affiliate is the one, who caused the sale. Mostly bouth are the same or even the second one isn´t set. So usually the "first" affliate gets all commission, but when there is a "different actual one", then the commission should be shared. However, your Idea is much better. Let´s define the commissions separately: 1. The "actual" commission 2. The "returning-customer"-commission. Amazon for example only pays direct commissions. The affiliate-systems work with "only direct" or "cookie-lifetime", but none makes a difference between this two kinds of customers. Based on your Idea I think it could be very, very interesting to define the commission-structure different. The "commission for direct" and the "lifetime-commission". This alows to share commissions. And also it´s just an option. When the commission actualy in PAP is the "lifetime-commission", everything can keep the same, you just add some more commission-fileds: "Direct commission" and set them to "0". So every installation keeps the same, the difference only affects when somebody starts to add the "direct commission". Very nice Idea! Best wishes, Julian! PS: Please don´t answer me here. I´m trying to keep an eye in the forum and I read a lot in mantis, sometimes I look in the features-requests, but I don´t track everything here, becaus it´s just too much. ;-)
I can not believe I jsut found this post, I am planning a new website and this is EXACTLY what I am looking for an affiliate system to do! If you can get this going then PAP has gone from a probable buy to a definate buy for me!
yes, we plan to implement this. You can be sure, that within 2-3 months it will be in PAP4. First we need to solve some technical problems, because split commissions means to save all clicks data what can mean huge database tables.
I would like to suggest one small change to your proposal. I would like the option to set the commission percentage for the affiliate who generates the sale (the "last" affiliate in your example), and have everyone else, *including* the first affiliate split the remaining commission. The reasoning is that the last person is most important: with no sale, nobody gets any commission. The first person isn't more important than the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. If the 1st person hadn't referred, the 2nd, 3rd or 4th person would have. Thanks very much for the opportunity to give input. -David
David, yes, our model will allow what you described. Simply first affiliate will not have special bonus. Special bonus will be assigned just to last affiliate and all other will receive rest divided by number of all affiliates
Found this a bit late, but this is an excellent idea. David, I agreed with you, then I changed my mind, here's why: Your theory assumes that traffic flows randomly. In reality, #1 found the customer, #2-#4 were probably research(!) found while making a decision, and #5 actually closed the deal. Now I'll grant, #5 is very important, but without #1, there would be no #2-#4, or #5. Viktor, you don't need to track every click. Just keep a stack with a two column key, and an incrementing value. Here is some pseudo-SQL to show what I'm talking about. Every time there is a visit: INSERTORUPDATE visitorder, isfirst INTO visitstack VALUES(incrementedid, isfirstreferrer) WHERE visitorid = v_id AND affiliateid = a_id AND NOT isfirst; When you calculate commission: SELECT affiliateid FROM visitstack WHERE visitorid = v_id ORDER BY visitorder ASC; The above query will return the affiliates involved, in the order of their last involvement. This should result in only a marginal increase in the size of tables queried, and will prevent time consuming data mangling at the time the order is captured. Also, you probably only need to index the table by visitorid, which isn't going to be a big deal, even with enormous stores.
yes, we will need to store information about each visitor, but we need to store also all steps/clicks through page. Later in cron we will select just data, which are important - we can't evaluate it on the fly, because it would be too slow - therefore we need to store every click. We plan in addition to make a module, which will compute "Order path" of visitors ... but it will take some months until such module will be scheduled for development. First we need to implement other interesting features.
WEll ... it´s really very interesting. If a customer comes thorugh Affiliate A a couple of times (let´s say 20 times), then just one time by Affiliate B and then the sale happenes after he came with affiliate C. Then it looks a little bit to weired to give Affiliate B, who only refered one time, the same as Affiliate C. But counting the klicks and then sharing the commision "by clicks" instead of "by affiliates" looks a little bit overdoing it. My personal first thought was: "The first and the last". My second thought was to simply make a little Quality-distinction: - A "normal" Click is a a click that brought somebody in. - A "value"-Click is a click that made a sale directly. This makes some sense for me, because then we also have a difference between the click-types. It can be used as "x% comission by every normal click" and "y% when directly bought something". However, I just had the Idea that your way of sharing between all has one very big opportunity: When 10 Affiliates get a commission instead of two affiliate, this means that 10 Affiliates are motivated to go on instead of two. For my opinion this is not totally fair ... but it will work. ;-)
In first implementation we plan to count number of affiliates and not clicks, because I'm sure some affiliates will be so "clever" and tell customers to click hundred times before sale. Later, if we will see, that customers use this feature, we can extend it ... (e.g. we will count time between clicks and clicks within e.g. 1 hour/day will be counted as one click from one affiliate)
Great! I would want split commission with my autor's ebook....i mean... ME= 40% Autor's ebook= 30% Affiliate= 30% I'm waiting split widget with anxiety!!! (sorry for my english... :-) ) Ciao Paolo
Hi This sounds fine, on the "screen", but i see a few issues here. - Please make note, that i don't know your software's features yet. How would this affect second tier, third tier and so on, which affiliate would benefit? This might fit some products, while others not, would it be possible to differentiate between products, e.g. product! gives commission to the last affiliate only, while product2 shares the commission between each affiliate? Regards Frode L
Split commissions will be reflected on all levels correctly. In this way one sale can generate multiple transactions (e.g. as it is now for multi-tier commissions) I don't think there will be any problem with computation of correct value of commission. Commissions will be split on all levels of commission tree. Example: Affiliate1 has 50% commissions Affiliate2 has 30% comissions both affiliates referred sale for $100 In this case Affiliate 1 will receive 50% from $50 = $25 Affiliate2 will receive 50% from $30 = $15 If affiliate1 has parent affiliate and you pay e.g. 5% on first tier, his parent will get commission 50% (because commission is spitted between 2 affiliates) from 5% = $2.5 Splitting commission functionality will calculate for each affiliate correct total value of order and than will be applied all commission rules as it is now. I hope this explains it.
hi, when we will see this release module? I'm not patient! :-) Ciao Paolo
It will be released this summer. Currently is in development new tracking module, which will be capable to track more than 100 clicks/sales/leads per second ... and based on this tracking module we will implement also split commissions feature. This is very sensitive part of PAP4, so we don't want to speedup development and discover problems later in production
Thanks a lot Viktor! Have a nice day! Ciao
Hi Viktor, news for split commission? Thanks a lot...Paolo
Developers are already working on it. We waited until new high performance tracking will be ready (during summer it was in development and finally it is ready, so split commissions is under development now). During September or beginning of October we should release it if all will go fine (first we will test it on our affiliate program at the end of this month). It is quite complicated feature, because it touch nearly all parts of tracking module - therefore we can't release it in hurry. Viktor
very, very thanks Viktor! :-)
hi Viktor, what about split commission? Thanks ciao Paolo
Hi Paolo, Great news is, that Split Commissions will be released in next version ... I think it will have number 4.4.x already We are excited how great feature it is and how it works (some tests we already executed on our installation of PAP). After so much months, when we talked about this feature we can finally say, that affiliate programs based on Post Affiliate Pro will be fair to all affiliates - I guess it will be only one affiliate software, which does similar thing. Next version should be released within next two weeks in standard deployment schedule. I hope you will love this feature as we do :-) Viktor
very thanks for this great news Viktor! :-)
I think it's going to be exciting to see how it affects your overall sales and % of sales due to affiliate efforts. The big question is: Will it increase or decrease your affiliate sales? It's worth trying out. Btw I saw one commission already today so maybe it's working - but even more important it's keeping PAP in my mind and making me think "how can I promote PAP more?" :) Thanks for "pushing the envelope".
Yes, it is question what will be result. Yes, there were already few sales referred by more affiliates today and Split commission correctly assigned commissions. True is, that now affiliate can earn less in particular sale, but now is sure, that he will get at least some % from each sale, if he referred that sale together with others. Motivation of affiliates grows with each sale they refer, so I hope split commissions will increase overall motivation .... Affiliates will see more often notifications about new sale The most important is, that now will be assigning of commissions fair.
I actually think it's a BAD solution for people who do serious Adwords advertising for products as an affiliate. Until now, i was able to track my profitable camopaigns down to the ad, keyword etc. However now, I can no longer make predictions for the future and adjust my campaigns accordingly (bid price for example) because my income from one sale now varies. I don't like this. It makes advertising for you a veryvague job. It would actually be interesting to see stats on how the numbers actually are (from recent past for example)? Which percentage of all affiliate sales were referred by multiple affiliates?
Please don't forget: Some affiliates take huge effort to drive people to your offer and they spend a lot of money on introducing the prospect to you. Then, two or three others have a much easier job to "sell" the prospect on your product. However, the first affiliate now has to share... Strange way to do it and again: Not predictable anymore for me, which makes my Ad-tracking a nightmare!!!
Norman: We (Quality Unit) run google adwords too. And it is nothing special that click on google ad is NOT first click referrer. So we pay commission to affiliate AND google too. Personaly I prefer to define at least 30% bonus to first click referrer, we will analyze our customers shopping behavior and adjust SplitCommission settings to be optimal for our affiliates.
Right after we lunched the Split commissions feature, we saw, that nearly every second sale is referred by more than one affiliate. Imagine, that in the past you payed Adwords campaign, visitor clicked on your affiliate link after he already visited our site through another affiliate. You got no commissions, but you payed for click. .... was that fair ? Now is the question - what is more predictable ? I think, that it is much more transparent now, that each affiliates get his part of commission for each sale he will refer to us and not just in case he was the first. We have multiple types of affiliates and each of them invest a lot of money into promoting of our products: 1. Affiliate software comparison sites 2. Affiliate software reviews 3. eLearning video sites about our software 4. Adwords campaigns 5. Some affiliates want to buy own copy through own affiliate link 6. Discussion forums about our product .... and many other types of websites promoting our products Internet is spread with few thousands of our affiliates. It is clear, that before customer orders our product, he looks through more websites, compare more products, reads opinions of different users on our product and products of our competitors. Before he comes to decision to order something, he gets in touch with multiple affiliates and every affiliate shapes his opinion on our product. It is natural, that we want to reward all affiliates in decision making process. As Andrej mentioned, we will shape the splitting of commission with bonus for first and maybe also for last affiliate in decision funnel. First of all we want to measure flat splitting of commissions. Depending on results we will modify bonuses in few next weeks. We want to be transparent and we will inform all of you about all our results.