How to create affiliate marketing campaigns

Affiliate for WooCommerce plugin helps you to add, manage affiliates, and track performance from a single place – commissions, sales, payouts, leaderboard, etc. Earn money without hard work. Increase your brand outreach, and get potential customers.

The plugin allows you to create and manage unlimited creatives (affiliate marketing campaigns). Logos, banners, email swipes, videos, docs, sheets, audio files…any promotional material you can add to a campaign.

Using these campaigns, you can encourage affiliates to get started and promote your brand better. This will give you better-quality traffic and higher conversions.

Why use campaigns?

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By default, an affiliate’s referral link points to the home page URL of your site. Sometimes you may need to share a different URL with your affiliates. Or you may want to share designs that match your brand guidelines.

For example,

• During a new product launch, you want your affiliates to promote that new product and send them a direct link to that product instead of the default referral link.
• You want to send your brand logo and guidelines when affiliates promote you via a blog post, email, or on their Partner’s page.
• You want to share getting started/terms and conditions or any other instructions with your affiliates.

Here you can use the Campaigns feature. You can create and share as many campaigns with different referral links with affiliates.

The affiliates can find these as explained here.

Steps to create a marketing campaign

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The plugin automatically creates three ready-to-get-started campaigns when you first activate the plugin.

Refer to the below steps to create a new campaign:

1. Go to your WordPress Admin > WooCommerce > Affiliates.
2. Click on Campaigns at the top. The dashboard will show all your marketing campaigns.
3. Click on the ‘Add a Campaign’ button at the top right to create a new campaign. It will open up a ‘slide over panel’.
   
4. Enter the details for the campaign as follows –
   1. Name – Your campaign title. Makes it easy to understand for you and your affiliates what the campaign is about.
   2. Slug – Automatically generated link based on campaign name with UTM parameter and affiliate id. You can shorten the text within the link. Helps understand which campaign has worked well for an affiliate.
   3. Destination Link – This is where your affiliates’ audience will land. Example – A product page. No need to embed an affiliate’s link. The plugin will automatically add a unique referral link for each of your affiliates.
   4. Short Description – Mention some details about your campaign. It will be shown along with the campaign name.
   5. Full Description – Use the WordPress editor to insert promotional material like descriptions, banners, swipe files, videos, external links, or anything else you want to present to your affiliates.
5. Select ‘Active’ from the drop-down at the top and click on the ‘Save’ button.

That’s it. You have successfully created your affiliate marketing campaign.

Note – A campaign will appear to affiliates only when its status is ‘Active’. You can create unlimited campaigns and save them, put them in Draft or Active state as and when required.

Edit / Pause / Delete campaigns

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• Go to your WordPress Admin > WooCommerce > Affiliates. Click on Campaigns at the top.
• Select any campaign to edit it.
• To pause a campaign, use the ‘Draft’ option from the drop-down at the top and click on the Save button.
• Use the delete icon which is to the right of the ‘Save’ button to delete a campaign.

How will affiliates find the campaigns?

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Once your campaigns are created and active, your affiliates will find the generated campaigns from their My Account > Affiliate > Campaigns section.

Clicking on a campaign will open a slide-over panel and show all the details of the campaign along with the marketing material added within the campaign.

You can also shoot out an email to your affiliates when your campaign is ready. However, you have to manage this on your own.

Track affiliate campaigns using UTM

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The plugin allows you to add a UTM parameter to the affiliate referral URL. This helps you to track and monitor the performance of each campaign within your Google Analytics dashboard.

Very much useful to spot the best traffic sources, conversions, best affiliates and improve your marketing campaigns.

Steps to add UTM parameter to affiliate referral URL

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• Go to your WordPress Admin panel. Click on WooCommerce > Affiliates. Click on Campaigns at the top.
• By default, the name you give to your campaign will be the UTM campaign parameter.
• To manually modify the UTM campaign parameter, under Slug, enter what you want to name your campaign.
• For example, if you enter ‘new product launch 2021’, the affiliate referral URL will look like this – https://www.yoursite.com/?utm_campaign=new product launch 2022&ref={affiliate_id}. Other campaign examples could be Facebook ads, Twitter posts, Instagram posts, etc. 
• Select ‘Active’ from the drop-down at the top and click on the ‘Save’ button.

Your affiliates can use this URL in the various promotions they run – email, social media, etc.

You can now track this particular campaign performance in your Google Analytics dashboard.
(Note – Your website must be connected to Google Analytics to track campaign performance).

Feature request

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Have a feature request or enhancement suggestion for Affiliate For WooCommerce? Submit it from here: Submit a feature request or send it to us from here.