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 Discount Offers or 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.
At Aspire, you can create a Discount Offer, which is a combination of a unique code with a trackable link.
Content creators and affiliates can share their link so customers no longer need to manually add the promo code because it automatically applies at checkout.
This also alleviates the need to create two separate offers: one for promo codes, and one for link tracking. 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.
This is a best-of-both-worlds scenario for the creators and affiliates since they can opt to share only their 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.
To learn more about creating promo codes within Shopify, please check out this article.
Note: Promo codes are only Shopify supported at this time.
What are Non-Discount Offers or 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.
To learn more about creating tracking links, please see this article.
Important: Before creating tracking links in Aspire, you’ll need to have a conversion tracking method implemented for your offer. Please refer to this article for a comparison of the different conversion tracking methods.
The Difference Between Discount Offers and Non-Discount Offers
Tracking links work similarly to promo codes, in that they can be traced back to the relevant influencer or affiliate. But please note that there is no discount for the customer when using a Non-discount offer or a tracking link.
Discount Offers are available only if you have a Shopify store connected to your Aspire account.
Important Notes:
We do not currently support the ability to delete sales tracking offers, but you will be able to archive your offers. To learn more, please see this article.
We do not currently support appending promo codes to sales tracking links, however, we do have a feature called Discount Links where you can provide a link to your members that auto-applies their code once the link is used.
If you’re providing your members with a link and promo code, the conversion attributed to the link will automatically be marked as a duplicate to avoid double commissions. More information here
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 promo codes, if you previously did not have your Shopify connected, we will not retroactively pull conversions into Aspire.
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 manage and edit your payout options even after generating links or codes, but after this point, you won't be able to edit other offer details. If you click the gear icon on your offer and the ability to edit the offer details are 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.