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 campaigns in their account as explained here.

What can you share with affiliates via campaigns?

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You can share marketing assets, promotional materials, and instructions with your affiliates.

Logos, banners, swipes, videos, guidelines, giveaways, social media assets, infographics, T&Cs, landing page links, coupon codes, doc links, product QR codes…

More information is in this FAQ.

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. Visibility – Using this you can show campaigns either to individual affiliates or to affiliate groups. Search affiliates either by name or email address or to a group of affiliates using affiliate tags to add restrictions.
   5. Short Description – Mention some details about your campaign. It will be shown along with the campaign name.
   6. 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.
6. 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.

How to share campaigns with specific affiliates?

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The Visibility option in the Campaign editor allows you to restrict access to a campaign to specific affiliates, or to a group of affiliates (using affiliate tags).

Upon setting the visibility, only the selected affiliates or affiliates from the selected affiliate tags can view the campaign.

If no affiliate/affiliate tag is set in the visibility, the campaign will be visible to all affiliates.

How to restrict campaigns?

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• Restrict by individual Affiliates – Type either the affiliate’s name or email address. Select from search results in the Visibility field.
• Add group restriction by using Affiliate Tags – Type the affiliate tag to include affiliated groups.
• Repeat any of the above steps to add multiple restrictions.
• Removing restrictions – Click “x” next to the affiliate’s name or affiliate tag to remove the restriction.
• Select ‘Active’ from the drop-down at the top.
• Click on the ‘Save’ button.

Note – You can restrict a campaign to an affiliate and affiliate tag together as well.

The affiliates can find these campaigns in their account as explained here.

Edit / Pause / Delete campaigns

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• Go to your WordPress Admin > WooCommerce > Affiliates. Click on Campaigns at the top.
• Click 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 tab.

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.

How campaign tracking works

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Each campaign will have its unique link. When affiliates share the campaign’s affiliated link, visitors will arrive at the destination link and will be attributed to the campaign.

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 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 > 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 2023’, the affiliate referral URL will look like this – https://www.yoursite.com/?utm_campaign=new-product-launch-2023&ref={affiliate_id}. Other campaign examples could be Facebook ads, X (formerly Twitter) posts, Instagram posts, etc. 
• Select ‘Active’ from the drop-down at the top.
• 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).

FAQ’s

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1. Campaigns tab is not visible on the affiliate’s dashboard?

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The Campaigns tab will be visible to the affiliates only if you have an active campaign on your site.

2. Can I use campaigns to share only marketing information/assets with affiliates?

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Campaigns are a way for you (Store admin) to communicate with your affiliates. So you can create and share any type of information. Few examples:

• Affiliate terms and conditions
• How-tos campaign – explain how to promote using an affiliate link or coupons, locate products or categories, payout frequency, etc
• Brand logo, guidelines, creative description – When affiliates promote you via a blog post, email, or on their Partner’s page.
• Images, demo videos – To describe your product, highlight the features and benefits.
• Landing pages, docs – During the launch of a new product.
• Swipe files, PDFs, and ebooks – During a giveaway or any other promotional offer to build brand value.
• Marketing collateral/sheets – Promoting top-selling products, and brand building.
• Audio files, PPTs, videos – Promoting courses, music albums, podcasts.
• Banners – Use campaign visibility to restrict the campaign to deal sites and handpicked affiliates during the Black Cyber sale, Christmas sale, or other promotional offers.

The possibilities are endless…

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.