Affiliate WP integration

Affiliate WP integration

By utilizing AffiliateWP integration with Tickera you can allow registered users on your website to share referral links to your event. That way, you can gain more visits while they are able to get a cut of each ticket that is sold via their referral link.

Now, let's get to the business and see how to set everything up.

First off, you will need, of course, AffiliateWP plugin.

Also, to make Affiliate WP work with Tickera you will need an Tickera integration add-on that will bridge the two. This add-on is free and can be downloaded from here.

Installation and configuring

When you have downloaded AffiliateWP plugin and Tickera Integration add-on, you should install and activate both like any other WordPress plugin. If you are new to WordPress and not sure how to do this, you can find thorough instruction about it here.

Once you install and activate AffiliateWP you will find many options and settings all of which are well documented on AffiliateWP documentation pages.

However, let's briefly overview what is offered in the Settings area of AffiliateWP and how is that important for you as Tickera user:

1. License Key - here you should enter your AffiliateWP license key
2. Affiliate Area - here you can select page which will be used as Affiliate Area. By default, AffiliateWP creates a page automatically but if you want to use other page for this purpose, you can basically use any page that has [affiliate_area] shortcode
3. Terms of Use - Page which contains Terms of Use for users that are registering as affiliates on your website
4. Referral Variable - Here you can enter a variable that will be used in referral URL. By default it is ref  but you can change it to anything you want.
5. Default Referral Format - Choose whether you would like to use users referral ID or username appended to referral link
6. Pretty Referral URLs - Here you can select whether you would like to show pretty referral URLs to affiliates. Basically, you can select whether affiliate ID or username will be appended to the affiliate URL
7. Credit Last Referrer - Select whether to credit last affiliate who referred a customer
8. Referral Rate Type - Select whether your affiliates should receive their cut as percentage of the price or as flat amount
9. Referral Rate - Enter amount of the default referral rate. This value will be used if you leave blank field of the same purpose when adding new affiliate. However, when adding new affiliate, you can define custom referral rate for each affiliate
10. Exclude Shipping - Set whether to include shipping price to referral rate or not
11. Exclude Tax - Select whether to apply referral rate on the price that includes tax or not
12. Cookie Expiration - Set for how many days should the referral tracking cookie be valid for
13. Currency Settings - Standard currency settings that are pretty much self explanatory

When you have set up everything here, navigate to the tab named Misc where you can find following options at your disposal:

1. Allow Affiliate Registration  - Select whether to allow users to register as affiliates for themselves
2. Require Approval - Select whether account should be approved by site admins prior being able to earn referrals
3. Auto Register New Users - Select whether new users should automatically have affiliate status or not
4. Logout Link - By checking this you will place a logout link in the affiliate area on the website
5. Default Referral Link - Here you can enter URL that will be used as default referral URL. This comes handy if you are hosting only one event in which case you should enter event page URL here
6. Google reCAPTCHA - Google reCAPTCHA related settings
7. Reject Unpaid Referrals on Refund - Reject referrals that are unpaid or refunded
8. Use Fallback Referral Tracking Method - Check this if you are encountering errors due to jQuery errors in referral tracking
9. Ignore Zero Referrals - Ignore referrals that have zero total amount

Adding New Affiliates

Once you have it all installed and configured you are ready to start adding affiliates which can be done in several ways.

Let's first navigate to the Affiliates area of AffiliateWP. Once you the page loads, you should be able to see something like this.

Here you will find a table of existing affiliates but if you are starting fresh, it is perfectly normal for this table to be empty. Also, you can add new affiliate by hitting Add New button. If you do that, new page will load.

1.  User - Start typing username of an existing user here to select it. If, however, new affiliate doesn't have user account yet, you should create one by using default WordPress default user management area
2. Affiliate Status - By default it is set to Active but can also be set to Inactive and Pending
3. Referral Rate Type - You can set here whether you would like to use Site Default referral rate type (which you have set previously in AffiliateWP -> Settings) or choose custom one for this affiliate (Percentage or Flat)
4. Referral Rate - Here you can enter referral rate for this affiliate. If this field is left blank, site default value will be used (which you have previously set in AffiliateWP -> Settings)
5. Payment Email - Affiliate email that will be used for payments with systems that support such payment methods (PayPal, Skrill, etc.)
6. Welcome Email - Select whether to send welcome email after registering affiliate or not. Emails can be configured within AffiliateWP Settings -> Email tab

The other way of adding an affiliate is by registering user account through WordPress default user registration system in the back end. So, when you are manually creating user account in the back end, you will notice that there is an additional checkbox in addition to the standard ones on the user registration page.

If you check that checkbox when creating new user account, that user will be automatically added to the list of affiliates and site default values will be used for referral rate type and referral rate.

Running Tickera alongside AffiliateWP

So, you have created your event and tickets and went live with ticket sales. Also, you have a couple of people registered as affiliates. But how do you get them to share your event page and get their affiliation referral cuts?

First, they will need to log in to their account and then visit Affiliate Area page (basically any page that contains [affiliate_area] shortcode).

On that page, affiliates can easily create referral links by following three simple steps:

1. Page URL - When AffiliateWP is used with Tickera, affiliates should enter event page URL here
2. Campaign Name - This may come handy if affiliates are creating several campaign but is completely optional and may be left blank
3. Referral URL - This is where referral URL will appear once it is generated and this link should not be altered in any way as any change to it may render campaign invalid
4. Generate URL button

So, once affiliates create their referral URL they can share it and each Ticket purchase preceded by clicking that referral URL will earn affiliate a percentage or flat referral rate (depending on the Settings).

Also, within affiliate area, affiliates can check their statistics, see graphs, visits, etc.

Site admins, however, can get an insight on affiliate's referrals performance in the back end with the same options available.

Sending Payments to Affiliates

Once you reach the point where you need to pay out your affiliates, there are several ways of doing this all of which are thoroughly described here.

Wrap up

Using AffiliateWP alongside is fairly logical and easy process which requires just a few things to set up. However, if you found instruction here insufficient for your needs, we suggest you to visit AffiliateWP documentation pages where all the bits and pieces of the plugin are covered with an awesome FAQ section which might be a good starting point for finding answers to your questions prior digging up deeper.