One of the best ways to measure the results of your influencer and affiliate campaigns is to use promo codes and tracking links. Both will help you track member’s performance so you can see their impact and improve your future marketing efforts.
In this article, you’ll learn how and when to use promo codes and tracking links, as well as the difference between the two.
What are Promo Codes?
Promo codes (also known as discount codes or coupon codes) are a mixture of letters and numbers that make up a specific code. This code can be entered by customers at checkout to receive a discount on the items in their cart.
You can give your content creators and affiliates unique promo codes so you can see which purchases they’ve influenced, regardless of whether their followers clicked on a link to get to your website. You can also offer commission for sales generated.
This is a great option for social platforms that don’t allow links in their posts. While a link in bio can help grab some of that traffic, you can’t depend on all social media users to exit the post they’re on and find the right link in the creator’s bio. Many may simply go directly to your social media profile or website, leaving the influencer’s impact untrackable, so we recommend using custom promo codes to see an influencer’s overall impact.
What are Tracking Links?
If you’re not offering a discount to your creator’s following, you can still measure a creator’s impact and compensate them in the process by setting up tracking links. A tracking link is a unique URL assigned to a specific member that redirects to your website or specific product page. When a customer clicks on the link and makes a purchase, it will be attributed back to the member and they can receive a commission for sales generated.
Aside from using tracking links to track product sales, we recommend using tracking links when tracking website visits and other conversions such as email signups, downloads, and lead generation form submissions.
Tracking links can be used in Instagram Stories, link in bios, blog posts, sponsored content and video descriptions to drive traffic.
The Difference Between Promo Codes and Tracking Links
Tracking links work similarly to promo codes, in that they can be traced back to the relevant influencer or affiliate. However, there is no discount for the customer when using a tracking link.
Both can be used to provide your members with a commission based on the sales they generate.
You can provide your members with both promo codes and tracking links. In fact, using them together increases your chances of getting clicks and sales. Some people will choose to visit your site directly and type in the code, while others will prefer to click on the link.
💡 Pro Tip: If you are only planning to provide either a promo code or a sales tracking link to your members, and not all of your members will get both, please add the separate “Generate Promo Codes” and “Generate Sales Links” stages to your project. This will allow you to skip members through the project stage they don’t need to be in.
Important Notes:
We do not currently support the ability to delete sales tracking offers.
We do not currently support appending promo codes to sales tracking links.
We do not currently support conversion management. If you’re providing your members with a link and promo code, you’ll want to make sure the commission is applied to only one offer and not both to avoid paying out double commission.
Sales tracking data cannot be edited in Aspire.
Recent changes to third-party cookies have affected the ability to track and attribute links with the highest level of accuracy. If you’re using a pixel as your tracking method, we recommend applying the commission to your promo code offer instead of your tracking links.
For sales tracking links, we can only track conversions if the pixel or postback URL was correctly implemented, assuming the conversion was made before the cookie expired and no cookie blockers were used. This means that we cannot track conversions for websites you have no ability to implement a pixel to (ex. Amazon, Target, Walmart).
You can only edit an offer up until the point where you have begun generating links or codes. If you click the pencil icon on your offer and the ability to edit the commission and other offer details is grayed out, then it is past the point where this is possible. You will need to create a new offer and deactivate the old one.