One of the hurdles I’ve had to overcome when building Siren was how do I handle the tracking cookie? It’s a necessary piece in any affiliate program, since you never really know if the visitor can be identified with something more-reliable, like a user ID or not. Older systems call these “visits” or “visit IDs”, but Siren uses a more-generic term, opportunities.
Siren uses this term because a visit can only be one thing – a person who visits your site, app, or whatever. An opportunity can be anything.
Old Affiliate Plugins See Clicks, Siren Sees Opportunities
The nerdy definition I came up with while coming up with this is:
A single instance of something from which rewards can be issued from. Generally created from, and tracked using, cookies. Usually represents a site visitor, but could be other things.
- Someone visited your site? Opportunity.
- A salesperson added a record to a CRM? Opportunity.
- A new bug was added to your bug bounty program? Opportunity.
- A suggested blog post topic was added to your blog content program? Opportunity!
This means that the input for a program doesn’t have to start with a site visit, or even a person at all. As a result, the people who choose Siren can build programs that look nothing like an affiliate program, if they choose.
- An affiliate program where opportunities are triggered when people visit a site
- A sales program where opportunities are created when someone fills out a contact form
- A support performance incentive program where opportunities are created when someone creates a support ticket
- A blog content program where a pitched blog post is marked as an opportunity for bloggers to take.
- A GitHub issue that’s marked as a bug bounty item becomes an opportunity for programmers to fix.
By controlling the input for an opportunity, you can create the basis that the rest of any performance-driven program can function. This opens up a way to create entire business systems that are gig-based that, prior to Siren, were absolutely not easy to set up.
Imagine if you could empower contractors to pick up small, measure-able tasks in your business automatically? How would that change how you run your business now?
Launch Day Capabilities
At-launch, Siren will support the basic visitor-based flow, where an opportunity is created when someone visits your site. When someone visits your site, an opportunity is created. This opportunity is tracked with a cookie, just like what older programs do.
I plan on using Siren in my own business a ton, so I’ll be creating integrations that will automate opportunity creation in different ways as they come up. I’ve already announced that I’m working on integrations with other plugins, like WooCommerce and LifterLMS, and I’m certain that there will be many more nifty ways to handle this, and can’t wait to make them happen.
Something I’ve spent a fair bit of effort thinking about is tracking data. I strongly believe in user privacy, and think that in-general GDPR is a good thing. Which, on the surface, might make the idea of creating something like Affiliate tracking software…awkward.
But really, I think this is a great opportunity to build software that can respect a user’s privacy and also track what is needed to make a performance tracking system work. When you think about GDPR from the onset of a project, it’s possible to build it to be easy to manage.
This is just a small taste of what makes Siren different from what you’ve seen. This platform has been built from the ground up as a complete departure from what you know about Affiliate Programs. I honestly believe that entire businesses can be ran using a series of well-built affiliate programs, and I hope that it will empower businesses to connect their goals to the contractors who work with them. I can’t wait to share more as we go, because we have a lot more to talk about.
Swim fast, dream big!