A Complete Guide to Affiliate Creatives

Creatives are pre-made banners and image assets that affiliates can use to easily promote your products or services. Instead of requiring that affiliates create their own banner images, or affiliate URLs, you can make it easy for them by setting up a list of pre-made banner images of various sizes, or text links, that they can simply add to their own websites or email newsletters.

In this article, we’ll show you how to create creatives for your affiliates, including how to categorize, and assign the creative categories the affiliate/s will have access to.

1. How to add creatives
2. How to categorize creatives
3. How to assign affiliates to creatives
4. Viewing affiliates in the Affiliate Area
5. Shortcodes for creatives

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1. How to add creatives

The Creatives are managed through the Creatives option under the main AffiliateWP menu in the WordPress admin:

To create a new creative, click the Add New button at the top of the screen:

You will be presented with a simple form to fill out.

• Name – this is a name given to the creative for administrative purposes only.
• Category – this is the category or categories available to assign to the creative (if no categories exist, there is a Create link to get started).
• Description – this allows you to enter a description for the Creative. This is visible to affiliates and is displayed above the creative.
• Type – this is the type of creative such as an Image or Text Link entry.
• Image – this is the full URL to the image file to use if Image is selected as the Type
• Alt Text / Text – this is the text that is displayed to be attributed to the image, and is only shown if Image is selected as the Type. Otherwise it will show a Text field when Text Link is selected for the Type.
• URL – this is the URL that the creative will link to.
• Privacy – this allows you to share a creative privately with a group of affiliates and/or individual affiliates.
• Status – this is the status of the creative. Active means it can be seen by affiliates; Inactive means it is hidden.

Once you have created and saved the new creative, it will be shown in the list:

From the Creatives list, you can view the pertinent details of each Creative, change the status, add or remove from a category, and adjust privacy settings for what affiliates can see the creative.

2. How to Categorize Creatives

You can add categories to better organize your creatives into groups for affiliates.

To add or edit categories, click the Manage Categories button, or navigate to the Creatives » Categories option under the main AffiliateWP menu in the WordPress admin.

To add a new category, begin typing a category name in the Name field, enter a Description if desired, and click the Add New Category button to save your new category. Your saved category list will now appear on the right side of the screen.

To edit or delete a category, hover over the category name, and click either the Edit or Delete option.

When editing the category name or description, after making your changes, click the Update button.

To select a category when adding or editing a creative, place the cursor in the Category field, select one or more categories, and click the Add Creative or Update Creative button at the bottom of the screen.

3. How to assign affiliates to creatives

You can choose an Affiliate Group and/or individual affiliates to share a creative privately in the Privacy section.

When viewing the Creatives list, you can filter by the Category by clicking on either the category name, or selecting the category name from the All Categories, or the Private & Public list, and clicking the Filter button.

You can also click the Affiliate Group or affiliate name in the Privacy column, as well as using the Private & Public dropdown to filter creatives.

Creatives that have a status of Active will be automatically listed under the Creatives tab of the Affiliate Area on the front end of your website, meaning they are visible and available for use by all affiliates.

4. Viewing Creatives in the Affiliate Area

Affiliates can filter the creatives by category when selecting the category name from the All Categories dropdown list, and clicking the Filter button.

Shortcodes for Creatives

• [affiliate_creatives] – this will display a list of all active Creatives
• [affiliate_creative id="123"] – this will display a specific creative designated by the id=”x” parameter. You can see more details on how to do this in our doc for the [affiliate_creative] shortcode.

And that’s all there is to it! If you’d like more in-depth information on the best way to use image assets and banners for your affiliates, take a look at our article on best practices for affiliate creatives and banners .