Show affiliate info anywhere on your site
Affiliate Info is a free add-on that allows you to show affiliate information based on the affiliate currently being tracked.
When a user clicks an affiliate’s referral URL and arrives on your website, the affiliate’s ID is stored by AffiliateWP. Affiliate Info simply shows information based on the tracked affiliate.
What do we mean by that?
Let’s say you have an affiliate named John who shares his referral URL. Any user that clicks on John’s referral link can now see a variety of information about John, anywhere on your website.
You can show:
- John’s WordPress display name
- John’s website URL
- John’s email address (be careful with this!)
- John’s gravatar image
- John’s WordPress username
- John’s biographical info (from his WordPress profile)
- John’s Twitter username
- John’s Facebook URL
- John’s Google+ URL
There are currently 9 shortcodes to show the information above:
[affiliate_info_name]
[affiliate_info_website]
[affiliate_info_email]
[affiliate_info_gravatar]
[affiliate_info_username]
[affiliate_info_bio]
[affiliate_info_twitter]
[affiliate_info_facebook]
[affiliate_info_googleplus]
There’s also 2 shortcodes that you can wrap the above in:
[affiliate_info_referred]
Show content only when an affiliate is being tracked (example shown below)
[affiliate_info_not_referred]
Show content only when an affiliate is not being tracked. Useful for providing a fallback.
If you’re a developer you can also access the affiliate information directly with some useful PHP functions.
Affiliate Info also works with AffiliateWP’s Credit Last Referrer option which means the information will change each time a new referral URL is used.
Here are some examples on how you can use this add-on:
Show your user who referred them
You can show a custom message based on the affiliate being tracked. For example, “You’ve been referred by John” or “Your site representative is John”. This builds trust between the affiliate and the user.
Here’s how you can do this:
Your site representative is [affiliate_info_name]
To make sure this message only shows when an affiliate is being tracked, you can use the [affiliate_info_referred] shortcode:
[affiliate_info_referred]Your site representative is [affiliate_info_name][/affiliate_info_referred]
Allow the site visitor to contact the affiliate
There may be instances where your affiliates are in direct contact with your customers. Show the affiliate’s email address, or add a form (Gravity Forms or another form plugin) which sends an email to the affiliate being tracked.
Note, if you’re going to show any form of email address out in the wild, make sure you protect it using one of the many plugins available on the WordPress repo.
Create a landing page
Create a landing page for your products that show the current tracked affiliate’s information. This is especially useful if an affiliate does not have a website, or you want more control over how your products are advertised. Affiliates can link directly to your landing page with their referral URL, and their information will be displayed.
How would you use the Affiliate Info add-on on your site?
What affiliate information would you like to show on your site?
As someone who has spent a lot of time working with conversion rate optimization I can say that this is absolutely awesome! Excited to get this going.
Let us know if you have any questions!
I do have one but i’ll email it as it’s unrelated.
This is fantastic. I actually had a “light” version of this developed for your plugin but am so excited to see the integration. You guys are awesome!!!
Glad you like it Michael!
I LOVE THIS! But there’s one way I suggest making this even better.
This is what I’ve been wanting to do, and I was thrilled to see this addon get me 95% there.
I’d like to collect testimonials from my affiliates and then make their affiliate link display that affiliate’s testimonial foremost (or exclusively) on the website.
Any chance this addon could be use (or enhanced) to do this?
Showing testimonials is an excellent idea!
Affiliate Info was designed to retrieve affiliate information rather than store it, so there isn’t any functionality that could would allow a testimonial to be added from an affiliate.
If you’re comfortable with a small amount of custom development then this could easily be achieved. You might like to add a textarea field to the edit affiliate screen (I’m thinking that only an admin should be able to update it) which would allow you to save the testimonial against the affiliate. Perhaps the affiliate sends it via email or a form submission.
Saving the edit affiliate screen would then store this testimonial against the affiliate in AffiliateWP’s affiliate meta database table, for easy retrieval at a later point.
Once you’ve got the testimonial stored it’s very easy to retrieve it, via a shortcode or PHP function. I’m thinking of adding a new shortcode to the Affiliate Info add-on that allows you to retrieve this information from that database table. It could look like this: [affiliate_info field=”testimonial”].
How does that sound? Let me know if you’d like some guidance on adding and saving the testimonial field on the edit affiliate screen, I’d be happy to put something together.
Yes, I think support additional fields with the shortcode could be adequate for now. It’d be awesome if it could integrate with a separate testimonials plugin, but that’s probably asking too much for now.
(Unless I did some kind of connection between an affiliate’s profile field and a separate testimonial post type.)
I know what I’m saying, but I’m not enough of a PHP dev to sit down and knock it out in a few minutes. This would probably take me days. 😛
You could certainly use a dedicated testimonial plugin, but it would need to store the testimonials against each user account. Something tells me most of them are just for storing testimonials, and they aren’t linked to user profiles.