Before continuing with this article, you should understand the fundamentals of server postback tracking. Below, we’ll focus on Server postback tracking with Partner ID. For information on postback tracking with Transaction ID, see this article.

💡 If you're looking to implement recurring subscription tracking, please see this article instead.

Step 1: Configure your Link Tracking Offer

You’ll first need to create a Link Tracking offer within your Sales Tracking dashboard in Aspire to obtain the postback URL snippet.

Directions:

Go to Reporting > Sales Tracking.
Click “Add Offer”, then select “Link Tracking Offer” from the drop-down menu.
Enter an Offer Name, Offer Description, Conversion Type, and Payout Option.
Set the Conversion Tracking protocol to Server Postback w/ Partner ID.
In the Offer URL tracking, enter the landing page where you want to redirect traffic.

The URL will need to include the variable {affiliate_id} and your store’s parameter for affiliate ID. The query parameter name is going to depend on your implementation. Please confirm what the query parameter will be with the engineer implementing this.

Basically, we need a way to pass this variable to your store - usually, this is done as a URL query parameter. For example, your offer URL could look like this: https://yourstore.com?affiliate_id={affiliate_id}

Step 2: Store the Session Identifier

Your store will need to be able to accept the affiliate_id as a query parameter.

Whenever a customer clicks on an affiliate’s link, we will redirect to the Offer URL and replace {affiliate_id} with the member’s unique affiliate_id.

For the example above, it would look something like https://yourstore.com?affiliate_id=123456

Your store will then need to handle recording the affiliate_id and storing it for that potential customer. Because it depends on your software, this is the most varied step in the process. The most common way is to store the affiliate ID as a variable in your e-commerce site.

💡 Important: If you have multiple domains (i.e. store.us and store.ca), you need to ensure the affiliate ID persists across both stores if the user changes stores.

Step 3: Return ID upon Conversion

When the customer converts, your store will need to make a GET HTTP request to the postback URL and include the affiliate_id for that session, the Offer ID, the conversion amount, and the Order ID.

For example, if the postback URL is

https://aspireiq.go2cloud.org/aff_lsr?offer_id=1&aff_id=AFFILIATE_ID&amount=AMOUNT&adv_unique1=ORDER_ID

The final URL will end up looking something like this:

https://aspireiq.go2cloud.org/aff_lsr?offer_id=1&affiliate_id=123456&amount=25&adv_unique1=547839

You can see what the postback URL to call is by clicking on “Instructions” on your Offer page within Sales Tracking.

💡 Important: You will need to edit AFFILIATE_ID, AMOUNT, and ORDER_ID to match the variables you are using on your website to store these values.

Once the postback is implemented, we highly recommend placing a test order to confirm whether all the macros and parameters are placed successfully in the right position. See this article on how to test your postback.