Create a Revenue Share in Siren

Distributors track a collaborator’s contributions over time and rewards them based on that performance after a set period of time has passed. Unlike programs, distributors do not trigger when someone purchases something on your site. Instead, distributors track aggregate data over time and then use that data to create obligations on a set schedule. So, distributors allow you to set up systems that track performance and reward collaborators based on their historical performance instead of what they’ve done recently. Since they are not bound to a transaction, they allow you to create several different incentive structures that are not possible with a program alone. For example, you could use a distributor for creating a profit share program where collaborators are paid a share of sales based on their performance. An example of this could be a platform that pays their course creators based on how many members complete that creator’s course. Another common use case for a distributor is a bonus program. A bonus program pays the top performing collaborators a bonus. For example, you could pay a bonus to the affiliate who generated the most sales last month or pay a blogger for generating the most visits to their content last month. Setting up a distributor is very similar to setting up a program. Let’s get into how to do that. Now, in our example, we’re going to set up a profit share program for an education site that has multiple course creators, and the access to the content is handled using a membership fee instead of charging directly for the courses itself. Each course creator will earn a share of the profits based on how many members consume their course content. The members who have the most uh members that consume their content gets the largest share of the pool. Let me show you what I mean. So here I have my commission pay calculator that helps kind of explain uh how these different how these different um program structures work. So in our case, we’re going to use a shared pool and let’s say we have 10 course creators and we’re paying them 25% uh of or the pool of money that’s available is 25%. So 25% of our profits from the memberships we are dedicating to all of our course creators as a bonus. And let’s say we earned $10,000 $10,000 in a month from our memberships. So we’re going to pay out 25% of that $10,000 and evenly distribute it among all 10 of our course creators. Now, normally we would just pay each of them an equal amount of money, $250 each. That is a equally shared pool. So everybody just gets their own share. They get they each get 10% of that 25% which is two and a half percent which is $250. Now if we wanted but what if what if we wanted to do this in a way where we rewarded the top performing course creators for making sure that our site uh our customers are being retained, right? They are staying, they’re not turning and um they’re being engaged, right? So in order for us to be able to reward that behavior, we want to take a share, make sure that the share is distributed based on performance. So we would imply, we would add what we call a performance bias. So we would as this goes up, right, you can see that it increases and it decreases quite a bit more. Um, so just in this scenario, you know, even just adding a little bit more of a bias here, uh, you can see that the top pay is earning $722 and the bottom pay is earning $2.88. So in this scenario, it would basically be that the majority of the course content that is being viewed by your members is by probably these top four people and then all these other people have these ones have a few people and then these people probably are lagards and they’re not really uh contributing nearly as much compared to the other people. So uh the way this works is of course everybody is being compared to each other and uh it’s based on everybody’s performance relative to one another. That’s how a performance shared pool works. So now that we’ve explained that, let’s go ahead and put this distribution together. I’m going to show you how we are able to actually measure uh who’s the top payee and who’s the bottom pay and how all of that works with a distributor. All right, so we are going to go into Siren and go to distributors right here. And if you’re from the dashboard, you can also just hover over Siren and click distributors directly. Once we’re in here, you can actually see I already have one set up. Um, so I’m going to go ahead and click on that and just show you how it works. uh and we’ll just kind of go through it one by one. So, of course, if you’ve uh remember seeing the programs, if you’ve seen how we create programs in Siren, it’s very similar. So, we’re going to give the program a name. In our case, it’s a membership performance program. Uh the description, paste course creators based on performance. We’re going to set the status to active. We’re going to select our currency. We’re going to set that revenue percentage to 25%. Right? So, just like in our example with that payment calculator, that payment was 25%. Right? So this is actually the pool, right? How much of the revenue is available. So this is the pool of money that can that is going to be distributed to everybody. This is not how much money you’re paying each individual contributor. This determines how much money is available in the pool from the time period uh that is being that is uh set up on the schedule. So in this case, we’re triggering this every month on the 25th. So that means that uh what’s going to happen here is the distributor is going to take all of the income that comes in from the things uh that are valid and relevant to the distributor and it’s going to keep track of how much uh sales are generated, how many how much money is generated in those transactions from that time period. And then it’s going to take 25% of that value and it’s going to say here’s how much money we can actually distribute. Here’s how much money we can actually distribute to uh all of the collaborators that are a part of this distribution pool. So that’s how that works. This is not a commission percentage or something like that. This is a revenue percentage, a share percentage that is available to your collaborators. Okay. From there, we’re going to set a distribution schedule. You can set it once a year if you wanted to do an annual bonus. You can set a weekly bonus or a monthly. Uh in my case, I’m going to set this to be a monthly bonus or a monthly uh distribution. Metric tracking events. These work a lot like engagement tracking events in programs. So basically these are the things that have to happen that you’re measuring right these are the things that you’re measuring that your collaborators are doing or that are related to your collaborators that determine uh their performance and determine if they’re eligible for the um distribution and how much they can get from the distribution. So in our case um there’s several of these. There’s site visited right? So this one works just like um on program. So an affiliate link when it is if the a uh a uh collaborator’s affiliate link is used uh it will use this uh same thing with blog post visited. So if a person is writing blog content on the site and um any con anytime that their content is read or viewed it’ll use this. And of course all these have a value and I’ll get to what that means in a second. Collaborator product sold. In this case, this is whenever a product that is owned by a collaborator is sold, it will track that and give credit for that coupon code used. Anytime a collaborator’s coupon code is used, it will track this right here. So, um if you were to if you wanted to create a bonus program for affiliates, for example, where maybe if they sell, um you know, enough revenue in uh or enough cars or enough of some kind of product, whatever it is, uh you could give them an extra bonus on top of it. You could use co coupon code use and site visited to keep track of how many sales they’ve done throughout the month so that you can figure out if they’re eligible for a bonus or not. um course completed and lesson completed. These are actually LMS specific. So in this case, this is for course creators. Uh so if a student completes their course, we’re going to give them uh credit or if a lesson is completed, we’re going to give them credit. Now here there’s this value and whenever you check these, you see that that value shows up on any of these. So what value is is it’s the number of points that the distributor credits whenever that thing happens. So in addition to the revenue pool that is being tracked by the distributor, how much money is being pulled up over that month, the distributor also tracks how many points each collaborator earns from these different metrics. So um and the point value determines how valuable doing that specific thing is. So in our case, we have course completed is worth 10 points and lesson completed is worth one point. So, if you have a course that has, you know, a series of lessons, we’re going to give a little bit of credit every time somebody completes one of your lessons, but we’re going to give a lot of credit if they actually complete the entire course. So, in other words, one point for every lesson and 10 points for every course. So, then at the end of the month, whenever all of the um the lessons are completed and the courses completed and all of those things, it’ll tally up those totals and it would use that to determine uh the revenue share. Right? This is how we’re measuring the performance of these collaborators. The incentive structure, this determines how we pay out, right? So in this case, it would be is there a bias? Is it even distribution? How how do we pay for the incentive structure? This is what determines who in the of the collaborators in this distribution gets paid. So there’s shared engagement pool, performance weighted pool, and top score wins. Shared engagement pool in that case would be an even distribution. So any collaborator that has earned any points at all would get credit. If they earned zero points, they wouldn’t get any money. But if they earned some points, they would they would get a cut. So that’s a shared engagement pool. In the case of performance weighted pool, it would work exactly like the shared engagement pool. The only difference is it would apply that bias based on everybody’s scores. So the top scores, so the people who have done the most earned the most points from the different metrics up above would be at the top of the list and the people who earn the least would be at the bottom of the list. And then top score wins. This one will pay one collaborator, not all of them. It will give them the whole entire um cut of the of the distribution. to the person who earned the most points. So, you can use this for competitive opportunities where uh you’re saying, you know, the top the top performer is going to get, you know, uh an extra 10% bonus or something like that. In that case, that would be roughly equal to uh the bias being basically non-existent. It would be basically one person would get the full 2500 and everybody else would get nothing. Okay. So in our case we want to use a performance weighted pool because we are paying based on performance of these memberships include in commission pool. So what this section is is um this section talks about what parts of a transaction is going to be tracked for the uh the um commission pool itself. So what this determines is what parts of the transaction are actually eligible. So if a maybe for example you are doing a uh a like a a bonus a onetime bonus for the top scorer the one affiliate who sells the most of a specific product out of all of the affiliates is going to get a $300 bonus or or something along those lines. Right? In that case, you would leverage um the this this allows you to filter out to only include those specific items in the pool to make sure that it’s only tracking those specific things with those things in the transaction. Um since we’re using a revenue percentage, uh this will um since we’re using revenue percentage, sorry, I realize I didn’t switch the camera over. uh since we’re using revenue percentage here, it’s going to basically calculate the total value of the transaction based on these filters. And um that’s going to be how it knows how much money is eligible for this distribution. So in our case, this this is very similar uh in how programs work whenever you’re creating a program down here where it’s determining what piece of the transactions are relevant to this program or in this case what are relevant to this distribution. So in our case, we want to account for discounts because of course we don’t want to pay out um we want to make sure that the value of a discount is being subtracted from the total because we don’t want to pay the total value uh of a transaction. So basically what this means is if you had a $125 transaction and there was a $25 discount, you only want to pay out $100. You don’t want to pay what the value was originally at 125. If you leave this unchecked, it would be $125. But if it was checked, it’s going to account for that $25 discount and only distribute the $100 value that was actually charged. Uh you’re going to also check fees because um some memberships and things like that also include setup fees and things like that. So, for example, um some I have uh I’ve seen a lot of hosting companies or or service companies, they’ll do a setup fee where they’ll charge a onetime like $500 fee to go in and set up the system or do whatever. And then after that there’s a monthly fee that happens thereafter. Uh so this would make it to where that fee is being accounted for in the subscription in the in the distribution. So if you want to account for that then this should definitely be checked. Obviously uh in the case of this specific program it’s possible that maybe you don’t want to account for that. Maybe you only want to account for the monthly revenue. It just depends on how you want to handle that. Next up is line items. So whenever you check line items you’ll see it adds a few other things. So line items are the actual stuff that people are buying. So uh the membership in this case it would be the membership itself. Um the cool thing about line items is you can actually filter what categories, what SKs and what product types are relevant to this commission pool. So let’s say for example you only wanted to account for uh you only wanted to pull up money related to a specific product. Maybe you were only working with uh let’s say you’re selling shorts in some kind of like late fall transaction where it’s the best the person who sold the most most shorts in the month of September is going to get uh you know a 25% share bonus or something like that. You could say shorts or whatever the name of the skew is here and it will only account for the shorts in that in that uh setup. Uh same thing with categories. Basically you can add any kind of category. So this could be maybe uh all pants and all shorts. Those categories uh you know would only be are the only line items that would apply to this distribution. Um and then with any of these types. So this would apply to both products and subscriptions. In our case, we really only want this to apply to subscriptions because for us memberships are only going to apply to recurring revenue, not necessarily things that are being uh bought in a one-off basis. So, we’re going to set that to subscriptions instead. Shipping and taxes, you almost never want to leave checked because you probably don’t want to pay a commission pay out commissions on shipping and you probably don’t want to pay out commissions on taxes. Okay, so that is basically how distributors work out or work. Um, so what this will do now is whenever we add collaborators to this over the course of the month, those the distributor will quietly track all of those things and then at the end of the month on the 25th, it will automatically create the obligations that we need to uh handle um who we need to how much we owe everybody and who we need to pay.