If you are in more then one affiliate network you may be concerned about having Affiliates with links from both networks leading to a situation where a customer’s sale actually gets posted to more than one network.
If you would like to de-dupe between multiple networks we would recommend implementing our AvantMetrics service. This allows you to de-dupe between networks. If you are interested in this additional service please contact support@avantlink.com.
If you prefer to de-dupe on your end the following information will be helpful. To prevent having sales post to more than one network you will need to set your own cookie that contains information about which networks link the customer last clicked on. This cookie can then be used on the order confirmation page to determine which networks tracking code you should output.
To accomplish this we suggest doing the following:
- All links from each network will need to have a network identifier parameter in the url. Something like “netid=avant” for AvantLink or “netid=othernetwork” for another networks links. AvantLink can help with this by automatically adding this parameter to all your links on the click through. Other networks may require that you configure your links with the network identifier parameter yourself.
- Your websites should have site-wide code added that looks for this url parameter, and if it identifies it, sets the last network source cookie. A couple notes about the functionality of this cookie.
- The cookie should be written/overwritten every time your website encounters the “netid” parameter in the url.
- The cookie lifetime should match the longest affiliate cookie days you have set in your program terms (e.g. if the longest affiliate cookie days you have in any network is 120 days, this cookie should be set for 120 days so that if a customer doesn’t buy right away but comes back 120 days later the network source cookie will still be set and allow you to give credit to the proper network)
- On the shopping cart order confirmation page, you will need to check this cookie and use it to determine which network tracking code to output. So for example, if you check the cookie and it contains “avant” you would output the AvantLink network pixel tracking code. If it contains some other networks identifier you would output that networks pixel tracking code.