My first job in the affiliate marketing industry was to answer the phones at a major network. Attribution was one of the hottest topics that came up very regularly when I spoke to merchants. We’d have all kinds of scenarios dropped on us; people have quite the imagination!

While the network I was working at did indeed have some advanced attribution capabilities, they were incredibly difficult to understand for new merchants, and with one simple misconfiguration, you were able to set your affiliate program up to where there was no attribution at all!

Last Click attribution made sense in the early days of affiliate marketing simply because there weren’t that many types of publishers, and even fewer types of merchants. But this changed rather quickly, and unfortunately the industry has been slow to adapt.

Some networks have tried to tackle this with AI. Under the hood, there really isn’t much to be gained. Any time attribution is handed over to machine learning models, it suggests giving commissions to affiliates that have higher conversion rates on a macro level. It’s the classic “correlation over causation” problem, and it can result in bias towards affiliates who most closely resemble the model’s training data.

Attribution needs to be carefully curated by each brand to fit their needs and their values. Unfortunately, this is needlessly difficult on most major affiliate networks.

ReferZone is designed to give you all the tools you need to craft the perfect solution for yourself.

There are many valid ways you could set your attribution model to handle the above scenario, so let’s look at how you can use our Attribution Models feature to approach this.

If you’re already a merchant on ReferZone, you can go to Settings -> Attribution Model in your account to follow along.

Understanding the Attribution Model Settings

When you reach the Attribution Model page, you’ll be greeted with an in-depth breakdown of exactly how your commission structure works. If you haven’t made any adjustments yet, you’ll have the default Last Click model:

When you click Edit, you’ll see some global settings that will apply to all affiliates in your program. The first set of options control how long your tracking cookies are active and how long you have to review your sales before they are paid out:

With an attribution window set to 30 days like in the above example, any affiliate click will track a sale as long as it happened within 30 days. This also counts for subsequent sales, so if a customer returns within that 30 days, the affiliate will receive another commission. 

The validation period controls the minimum number of days you will have to either edit the commissions or void them. This gives you time to allow your return policy to expire; you wouldn’t want to pay commissions on an order that was canceled, so we can’t pay out to affiliates instantaneously. Remember that this is a minimum number of days. We validate commissions on the first of each month, that way you don’t need to log in to your ReferZone account every day to check for commissions that might need to be reversed.

Click Recency and Global Splits

Perhaps the most important features in ReferZone to understand are the recency and split settings.

This should be pretty self-explanatory. When you favor early clicks, you award commissions to affiliates whose clicks are closer to the actual conversion. Favoring earlier clicks does the exact opposite. It’s rather simple, but these settings play a very important role when we get deeper into customizing our model.

You’ll very likely have sales that were influenced by multiple affiliates. If you leave the settings alone here, you’ll simply award your commission to either the first or last affiliate.

Global Commission Splits are where we can start to move beyond Last Click attribution and tailor a custom built Multi-Touch model. The first option, No split, simply awards commissions to one affiliate. The next two options will award commissions to every affiliate in the funnel, but they divide the amounts up differently.

If you choose Split progressively among all affiliates, then we will take your commission payout and assign a Split Rate to each affiliate depending on their click recency. We determine this rate algorithmically to where there is always an even spacing between all affiliates.

For example, let’s say you track a sale and the commission is $100. We’ll assume that your Click Recency preference is still set to Last Click. If only one affiliate got a click, then they will receive the full $100. If two affiliates get a click, then the last click receives 66.67% of the commission, while the click before it will receive 33.33% of the $100. If there are three affiliates, then it goes 50%, 33.33%, 16.67%. Four affiliates in the funnel results in 40%, 30%, 20% and 10%. This keeps adjusting no matter how many affiliates got a click.

If you’d rather split the commission evenly among every affiliate that had a click, then you can choose Split evenly among all affiliates. This will assign the same Split Rate to each affiliate.

You control the Split Rates for the top two affiliates by instead offering a Tiered Split:

In the above example, we’ve set the Last Click affiliate to always receive at least a 75% split of the commission, while the runner-up affiliate will get 25%. For easy math, that would be $75 to one affiliate and $25 to another on a sale awarding $100 in commissions. Optionally, you can mix in the Progressive and Even splits for the remaining affiliates.

Finally, you can also choose to do your splits between both the First Click and Last Click affiliates by selecting Split between first click and last click. It’s the same concept as the previous example, but the First Click affiliate will be treated as the runner-up instead of the affiliate who got the second-to-last click.

Global Suppressions

Now that splits are out of the way, you might want to consider certain situations where you don’t want certain clicks to count. These can be controlled by using Global Suppressions. These will apply to all affiliates, but you can set them to apply to only certain affiliates by using Label Rules, which we’ll cover later.

The Exclusion window controls the amount of time before a sale where a click can no longer count. This is sort of the opposite of the Attribution window, and can be used to prevent affiliates from dropping a click right before a sale is completed. For example, if you set this to 3 minutes, then any click that happens within 3 minutes of the sale will not count.

If your e-commerce platform supports event tracking, such as Shopify and Woocommerce, then a more robust way to do this would be to Suppress after Add to Cart. With this setting activated, then no click will count if it happens after a customer has added products to their cart. All previous clicks will still be eligible for a commission.

You can also choose to only award commissions on sales where the customer has never purchased from your store by choosing Suppress existing customers.

Label Rules

Labels are a way for you to organize your affiliates into groups that receive custom commission rates, attribution priority, and custom suppression rules like we just covered. Let’s add a Label Rule for all affiliates that we’ve given the assignment “Social Media Influencers”:

You’ll see the same suppression rules as above. If you choose Suppress existing customers in your Global Suppressions, you can opt to make an exception to this for your Social Media Influencers.

Another suppression option that is not available as a global rule is Suppress if no coupon used, which will remove these clicks if the customer did not use a coupon. This is especially helpful to apply on coupon affiliates if the customer visited those sites but did not obtain a coupon code.

But labels don’t just control special suppression settings; they can also be used to essentially re-order the click funnel. In the above screenshot, you can see that the Social Media Influencers are grouped in the same Attribution Priority as “All other affiliates”. Social media affiliates are often the first introduction to your brand, but in the affiliate marketing world they often have their clicks covered up by down-funnel publishers. If you value their promotion the most, you can move “All other affiliates” below the Social Media Influencers label by clicking the down arrow like so:

Now all your affiliates that are assigned this label will be considered before everyone else. If multiple social media influencers generated a click, we will use your click recency preferences among them first, then apply that to the remaining affiliates. So now the influencer who got the most recent click will receive the commission or the largest split if you’ve chosen one of the Multi-Touch options.

You can also move a label below “All other affiliates”. If you want to ensure that coupon affiliates are always considered last, add a Label Rule named “Coupon Affiliates” and then move their priority to the bottom:

Make sure that when you approve affiliates into your program that you keep your label assignments up to date. With this model, your social media influencers get considered first, then any affiliate without a label, and finally the coupon affiliates.

When you’re ready to apply your new Attribution Model, you will be provided with a breakdown of how it will all work:

When in doubt

Our team is always available to walk you through the available options and set your affiliate program up for success! While we built this functionality to be as user-friendly as possible, it’s an inherently complicated feature and we’d be happy to walk you through setting up a model that works for your business. If you have any questions, email us at info@referzone.io