What is a Collaborator?
Individuals or entities such as bloggers, influencers, or businesses that participate in your programs to promote your products or services.
Last updated: April 10, 2026
A collaborator is anyone who participates in one of your programs and earns rewards for measurable actions. You might think of these as “affiliates,” but in Siren an affiliate is just one of many shapes a collaborator can take.
Collaborators can be influencers driving traffic from social media, authors creating content you sell, instructors building courses on your platform, salespeople closing deals, or businesses cross-promoting your products to their own customers. The unifying thread is that each one performs a measurable action that contributes to your business, and Siren tracks those actions through engagements so the right people get credit.
A collaborator isn’t locked into one role. The same person can belong to multiple programs and earn from all of them. An instructor on a course platform might earn an affiliate commission for referring students, a royalty on sales of their own courses, a profit share based on how often their courses are watched, and a bonus when students complete their material. Each program rewards a different aspect of their contribution. The online course platform starter recipe sets up exactly this kind of multi-program arrangement.
This flexibility is intentional. People contribute in different ways, and Siren is built to capture as many of those contribution patterns as possible without forcing everyone into the same mold.
Tracking collaborator performance
A collaborator’s performance is tracked through engagements, which are recorded whenever an action they’re responsible for happens on your site. For Siren to attribute the action correctly, it needs some way to tie that action back to the collaborator. There are two main mechanisms.
Tracking IDs
The most common method is a tracking ID, a short string of characters appended to URLs the collaborator shares. When someone visits your site through a link containing that ID, Siren knows who referred them.
Tracking IDs can be changed at any time. Old IDs stay valid even after you assign a new one, so existing referral links don’t break. A collaborator with the ID “ABC” who later switches to “DEF” will still earn from anyone clicking an old ABC link, but they’ll only see DEF in their dashboard going forward. Both IDs are stored as aliases, which preserve a full history of every code ever assigned.
Coupon codes
Some integrations support coupon code tracking. You assign a coupon to a collaborator, and when a customer applies that code at checkout, Siren creates an engagement for the owner. This is useful for channels where a clickable link isn’t practical, like podcast sponsorships or printed materials. See Coupon Code Tracking for the full setup.
For developers: Siren is built on a typed event system. See the events reference to understand how the framework processes collaborator attribution through the event pipeline.