Affiliate Marketing Customer Journey Examples

OK, let’s work through a customer’s journey with an affiliate link where we actually create a conversion and a transaction and everything with one of our collaborators.

I have a special affiliate link here that ends in PRZ, which happens to be associated with a collaborator on my site.

So now that we visited the site, we now know that this collaborator is associated with this current visitor.

Let’s go to the store and we’re going to buy a beanie. We’ll add it to the cart. Let’s go ahead and also buy a belt, a cart, and actually, you know what, let’s buy three of these belts.

I really like them. So now we have one beanie and three belts totaling out to $183. Proceed to check out and we’re going to click place order.

OK, just like that, our order has been received. Let’s see what it looks like in Siren.

OK, back in the WordPress dashboard, if we hover over Siren and we click on conversions, we’ll see that we have a conversion or transaction one.

If we click on this transaction, we can actually see that, hey, three belts and a beanie.

The total was $183. We don’t have any obligations associated with this transaction right now because the conversion is still set depending.

And it’s still set depending because the way that we made this purchase in WooCommerce was we used a check payments approach, which is just usually used for testing and things like that.

If you were using like Stripe or something like that, where it automatically finalizes an order after its place, this would have automatically been set to complete.

And I can show you that by going over to orders in WooCommerce and we can see this status is on hold because since we’re using the check payments method, it’s saying, hey, we don’t know if you’ve actually received the payment for this yet.

So we’re going to put this on hold until you do.

So we’re going to pretend that we did and we’re going to set it to completed.

Now, again, in WooCommerce, if you were using Stripe or something like that, this would probably automatically be set to a status other than on hold.

It would probably been on processing or completed depending on how you’re set up.

But as soon as we go in here and we look at conversions, we can see that the status was automatically set to complete.

And we also now have an obligation ID associated with this order.

I click on the transaction.

Now we can see that we paid out ten dollars and ninety five cents for this sale.

And if we click on the obligation ID right here, it’s going to take us over to see the obligation that we actually owe for this transaction.

OK, we can see here that we have one obligation or Stephen Winter.

We don’t have a payout yet because we haven’t tried to actually pay this yet.

We’re just saying that we owe Steve ten dollars and ninety five US dollars.

We can also see here that the status is set depending on the pending status.

In this case means we haven’t tried to fulfill this payment and also we haven’t tried to reject it either.

It’s just kind of sitting here waiting on us to do something with it.

So I kind of threw a lot at you there.

A conversion was created and whenever that conversion was created, it was automatically associated with a transaction.

Now, what’s interesting about Siren is depending on what program you use and how you set it up and that customer’s journey, it’s possible that that one

transaction could have been associated with multiple different conversions.

And I’ll show you exactly what I mean right now.

In this scenario, we have three different programs, an affiliate program, a super affiliate program and a blog content program.

The blog content program and the two different affiliate programs are treated as two separate things.

And we know that because the affiliate program and the super affiliate program are both associated with an affiliate programs group.

So since they’re in a group together, only one of these two programs is ever going to convert whenever a transaction is created.

However, the blog content program is not in the affiliate programs group.

Therefore, it’s possible for two conversions to be created on this site, one for a blog content program and another one for either of the affiliate programs in this group.

Let’s walk through a scenario where that could happen.

So right now we have two collaborators.

We have Brad and we have Steve.

So it’s possible that if somebody visits a blog post written by Brad, because Brad’s in the blog content program, using Steve’s affiliate link, they would both get credit for that view.

And whenever the transaction happens, both of them would receive a conversion and a subsequent obligation for each of them.

Let’s walk through a customer’s journey as that happens.

OK, just like last time, we’re going to visit this site using the special affiliate link for Steve.

All right. So now we’re a customer and we’re on this site and we know that Steve has been credited with an affiliate link here.

Maybe he went to this home page.

Maybe he went to the blog.

Who knows. So we’ve now visited this post written by Brad.

So now two different things have happened.

One, we visited the site using Steve’s affiliate link and two, we’ve read this blog post from Brad.

And then if afterward, maybe something in Brad’s blog post or something causes us to visit the shop or add a product to our cart or something like that.

So then we go through and maybe we buy two things.

We buy a couple beanies and we proceed to the checkout and we fill out this form again and we place the order.

OK, we have now received a second order, this time with a beanie and a beanie with a logo.

Let’s see what it looks like in Siren.

Just like last time, we have an order on hold.

Let’s go ahead and set that to completed.

We’ll go over to our conversions and this time you’re going to see we actually have two conversions that were created and two obligations that were created as a result.

Both of them are associated with the same transaction, but they’re different obligations and they’re different conversions.

This is important here because what happened is because they are across two different programs, both of those obligations were created as a result.

If we click on the transaction, you can see that the total was thirty six dollars and we paid out a total of seven dollars and twenty cents across both of our programs for this transaction.

You can even see which obligations were created for the conversions right here.

And if we look at each one of these, open them up in new tabs just to make it a little bit faster, you’ll see one of these obligations is for Brad and the other one is for Steve.

Steve earned five dollars and forty cents as the affiliate.

Brad earned one dollar and eighty cents because he was on a program with a smaller percentage.

Now, if we go back to our obligations, we can see that we currently have three obligations in total, all of which are pending.