Now that your affiliate program is launched you need to manage your affiliates, keep an eye out for fraud, and pay affiliate commissions. This section will guide you through the basic day to day running of your affiliate program, what things you should be doing and what things you should be looking out for.
- Banners and Text Links
It is important to keep your banners and text links up to date. If you keep making new banners and text links available to your affiliates, they are more likely to put more of your banners on their site. After your have added new links we recommend that you email all your affiliates informing them of the update.
- Affiliate Commissions
You need to keep your commissions per sale, or payments per click up to date. If the competition is offering a better rate then your affiliates are likely to leave you. If you are lucky to get some very good affiliates that generate you a lot of sales then you should reward these affiliates individually with higher commission rates. You can adjust there commission rates from the standard rate when viewing their user info.
- Orders
Whenever you do a refund or receive a chargeback on an order you need to check that there are not any affiliate commissions attached. From the management area you have the option to look up order numbers. Enter the order number, and the date you received the order, if the order was tracked to an affiliate then the order will be displayed, and you will have the option to add a minus order. We suggest that if the order is not displayed you check the date before and after to account for server timezone differences. You should also check to see whether many fraudulent orders are coming from the same affiliate, if they are then you should suspend the affiliate immediately.
- Checking for Cheating Affiliates
If you are unlucky enough to get some cheating affiliates, AllAffiliatePro has several systems that work behind the scenes to remove fake orders or clicks. Sometimes a cheater can slip through the net, so you need to use the management functions to keep an eye out. Checking the affiliate refers is useful to see exactly where your affiliate traffic is coming from, so you can see if there is anything amiss going on. Displaying dead affiliates gives you the opertunity to contact affiliates that are no longer advertising your site, it is recommended that you remove them if they are not going to advertise your site again to speed up the system. Displaying affiliates earning over a certain amount can show affiliates that are earning far to much for the amount of traffic they are sending, this could be a sign that they are making fraudulent orders, so check their order history and compair the order numbers to your records. Checking conversions is useful if you are running a PayPerClick program, and are also tracking sales. This will display affiliates that are earning for visitors they are sending, but aren't generating any sales. If also running a PayPerSale program, I suggest you set the payment rates for raw and unique to '0' and change the affiliates program type to commisson or flat.
- Generating Affiliate Paydays
AllAffiliatePro calculates affiliates earnings and generates a report in the form of email's to you and the affiliates and a .CSV spreadsheet file, readable by most spreadsheet software such as MS Excel. Paydays need to be generated at the end of each Pay Period. Your affiliate program Pay Period can be whatever you want. You can pay affiliates weekly, fortnightly, monthly, and so on. You could even do it every day, or every 2 days, etc. Selecting Generate Payday from the management area starts this operation, but be warned, a payday cannot be undone, so only generate it if your sure. We recommend that you make a backup of your affiliate database before attempting to generate each payday. To do this select Backup DataBase from the Utilities section, and save the backup file to disk. Or select the "data" folder from within your affiliate folder, and download it to your local machine after you have run Backup DataBase. A payday is generated for every day from the last payday, up to, but not including the current day. So if you wanted your payperiod to end on the 31st, you would generate the payday on the 1st of the next month. This is becasue the current day is not yet complete and so commissions cannot be fairly calculated. Then send off the cheques, or you can use PayPal's mass pay feature to pay most affiliates. Visit PayPal.com for details.