Legacy Affiliate System FAQs

The Legacy Affiliate System allows you to create your own system that allows affiliates to send traffic to your site. The Legacy Affiliate System ensures that all of the payouts are sent by CCBill directly to your Affiliates based on your selection of a PPS (Pay Per Sale) system or a Shared Revenue system.

How do affiliate payouts work?

When an Affiliate refers a consumer to your site, the affiliate will receive a portion of the sale that the Affiliate referred to you based upon the settings that you have chosen. You will be issued payment for the remaining amount (after the Affiliate portion and fees are removed) on your next scheduled payment (dependent upon break amounts and time restrictions you set up).

You can check the Crecit/Check Transactions Report or the Check Amount Report for information about amounts debited from your account and credited to Affiliate accounts.

How do I set up an affiliate program?

Please note that if you're setting up an Affiliate Program for a subaccount OTHER than "0000" (the main account), click the Advanced Features link and disable CCBill Account Grouping.

  1. Log in to the Admin Portal.
  2. Browse to the Legacy Affiliate Mega Menu, then click System Set Up.
  3. Fill in the fields with information about the program you wish to create.
    • Redirect URL - When a surfer clicks on an advertisement banner, which is located on an Affiliate website, they will be sent to the Redirect URL . For example a valid Redirect URL for the home page might look like: 'http://www.yourwebsite.com/index.htm' and an example of the Tour page would be: 'http://www.yourwebsite.com/tour/index.htm.'
    • Banner URL - This URL points to the directory and file where your banner is located on your website. An example of a valid Banner URL is 'http://www.yourwebsite.com/banners/banner1.jpg'. There are ten fields available, which allow you to enter URLs pointing to ten different banners created for your Affiliate Program. You are only required to enter one banner, but you can enter up to ten, if required.
    • Banner Farm URL - The Banner Farm URL is a page you create, which displays all of your banners. Your Affiliates will be sent to this page after clicking the link you enter in the Banner Farm URL.Affiliate Payouts - Only one base payout type is required. If you are using free trials, select the percentage payout option. To offer a combination of percentage payout and dollar amount per sale, enter information for both the base percentage and dollar amount.
    • Telephone Billing Percent Payout - Telephone Billing is NO longer available within our system.
    • Base Percentage Payout - The fraction amount to payout for referred sales. This is the amount that will be paid to Affiliates when they send customers to your site provided the customer successfully signs up. If this amount is set to 50 then the Affiliate will receive 50% of the sale. Enter the percentage as 25, not 0.25.
    • Base Dollar Amount - The flat payout rate for referred sales. This option does not work with free trials. This is the amount that will be paid to Affiliates when they send customers to your site provided the customer successfully signs up. If this amount is set to 5.00 then the Affiliate will receive $5.00 from the sale.
    • Recurring Payment - To offer a portion of the recurring sales select Yes, otherwise select No.
    • Receive Sales Emails - Select Yes to receive an E-mail about each sale that the Affiliates refer to your website, otherwise select No. This E-mail contains the date of the transaction, the amount, and other valuable information pertaining to the sale.
    • Serve Banners - Select Yes to serve banners from your website, otherwise select No. If you select Yes then each time a surfer views your Affiliate's website, the advertisement banner will be loaded from your website, and will be displayed on your Affiliate's website. This will increase your bandwidth usage. The advantage to using this option is that if you change your banner image then your Affiliate will not have to re-upload the new banner. The new banner image will be automatically displayed on your Affiliate's site. If you select No then your Affiliates will save the banner image on their server, which will not have any effect on your bandwidth. In this instance you will need to notify the Affiliate to re-upload your updated banners.
    • Receive Signup Emails - Select Yes to receive an E-mail every time a new Affiliate signs up, otherwise select No.
    • Program Name - Enter a short and descriptive name/program designation for the Affiliate Program. For example, if the website's name is "E-cash", then the program name might be "E-cash Affiliate Program". The program will use a default name when nothing is entered.
    • Click Tracking - Allows you to choose the type of click tracking desired and define unique tracking for your Affiliates. You may choose Raw and/or one Unique option. Also choose from the drop-down menu the time frame (1, 3, 6, 12, or 24 hours) to use for breaking down the data collected. The title Click Tracking contains a drop-down menu with your Click Tracking history for the account. You can use this feature to view past settings for the account and re-activate those settings by clicking Activate. Click the X to close the history viewer. Raw is enabled by default and cannot be turned off.
    • Allow Affiliate to View the Following Clicks - Choose the level of detail you wish your affiliates to be able to view: Raw, Second Page, Unique (as you defined in Click Tracking above), or Form. Verify all the information and make changes as needed. The settings can be edited at any time but will only affect newly signed up affiliates; existing affiliate's setting will not change.
  4. Click Update to save the changes you have made.

Notes

If you set up both a Base Percent Payout and a Base Dollar Payout you will be providing affiliates with BOTH (Base Dollar Payout + Base Percent Payout).Affiliate Sign Up Form

Once the program is set up, the next step would be to set up the Affiliate Sign Up form on your website. Do so by obtaining the HTML code for the sign up form, under Legacy Affiliate > Signup Template. Find more information by referring to the Legacy Affiliate System FAQs.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do not complete this step, Affiliates will not be able to sign up. CCBill does NOT do any affiliate advertising for you.

How do affiliates register to my affiliate program?

Before affiliates start signing up you need to create a signup banner. To do so, please follow the instructions below:

  1. Sign in to the Admin Portal.
  2. Browse to the Legacy Affiliate Mega Menu.
  3. Click the Signup Template link.
  4. Copy the HTML code provided (CTRL+A to select all, CTRL+C to copy).
  5. Paste the code in a Windows Notepad file, or into any HTML editor and save the file with a .html extension.
  6. Upload the file to your server.
  7. Create a Sign Up link and send potential affiliates to the new page you just uploaded.

How can I view my sign up form traffic?

Traffic may be viewed in our Form Hits report.

  1. In the Admin Portal, navigate to Reports > Transaction Reports > Form Hits.
  2. Click Open Report.
  3. Select a date or date range.
  4. Click Apply Changes.

This report displays traffic doming into specific forms, submissions, and approvals. Additional Breakdown By options are available for further analysis.

How can I look up an affiliate?

To look up an affiliate:

  1. Sign in to the Admin Portal.
  2. Browse to Legacy Affiliate > Affiliates.
  3. Enter search terms in the available fields (Affiliate ID, Email, First/Last Name).
  4. Click Lookup.

From this area you may also sign up new affiliates or email your existing affiliates.

How can I edit an individual affiliates payout settings?

Payout settings for an Affiliate are edited by clicking on the Legacy Affiliate Mega Menu, then selecting the Affiliates link. After locating the Affiliate you wish to edit, click the link to modify their payout settings.

How can I deactivate an affiliate?

To deactivate an affiliate:

  1. Sign in to the Admin Portal.
  2. On the Legacy Affiliate Mega Menu, select Affiliates.
  3. Enter search terms to locate the Affiliate you wish to deactivate.
  4. Click Lookup.
  5. Locate the Affiliate you wish to deactivate and click the Active Partner hyperlink.
  6. Choose a suspend reason and enter notes (required).
  7. Click Continue.

How do individual payout, grouping, and system setup payout settings interact with one another?

Affiliates register to your account with the payout settings you define in the System Setup. After the Affiliate has signed up you may add the affiliate to an Affiliate Group. This overrides the settings for the Affiliate, allowing you to edit the affiliate's individual settings.

Settings are applied in the following manner:

  1. System Settings are as Default.
  2. Individual and Affiliate Group Settings override the System Setup settings.
  3. Individual Settings override Group Settings.

What's the difference between raw and unique clicks?

Raw Clicks - They represent the total number of times the banner or link advertisement were selected by a consumer. The impact of banner advertisements are evaluated by how often consumers who see the ad click on it.

Unique Clicks - The total number of Unique Clicks based on each unique IP address that clicked on the banner advertisement.

Sales per click report

You can locate a breakdown of these individual reports within your admin account at Reports Sales Per Click, this report provides a breakdown of Raw ClicksRaw RatioUnique ClicksUnique RatioForm Clicks, and Form Click Ratio.

Raw Ratio - the proportion of sales to raw clicks, based on the search parameters.
Unique Ratio - the ratio of Unique Clicks to sales, based on the search parameters.
Form Clicks - the total number of times consumers clicked on a Form based on the search parameters.
Form Click Ratio - the ratio of sales to form clicks for the search parameters provided.

These reports can be broken down by Date, Subaccount, or by Affiliate. The green area in the bottom part of the Sales Per Click report provides a sum of the total counts for each column's data.

What is affiliate grouping?

Affiliate Grouping allows Merchants to create different payout settings for different types of Affiliates and assign them to different groups with different payout settings.

Additionally, you can personalize Bonus Level Tiering and send emails to Affiliate Groups from within the Admin Portal.

Settings are prioritized and applied in the following manner:

  1. System Settings are the Default.
  2. Individual and Affiliate Group Settings override the System Setup settings.
  3. Individual Settings override Group Settings.

How can I create an affiliate group?

Follow these steps to create an Affiliate Group:

  1. Sign in to the Admin Portal.
  2. Click the Legacy Affiliate Mega Menu, then select Grouping.
  3. Click Create New Group.
  4. Enter a Group Name.
  5. Click Add.

The new group will now display in the Grouping page (step 2 above). Links to the right of the group will allow you to Edit Payouts, Delete, or Rename the Group. Links to the left will allow you to Email a group or Assign Affiliates to a group.

How can I assign an affiliate to an affiliate group?

In order to assign an Affiliate to a group you have previously created, complete these steps:

  1. Sign in to the Admin Portal.
  2. Click the Legacy Affiliate Mega Menu, then select Grouping.
  3. Click Assign Affiliates.
  4. Select the Affiliates you want to add to the group and the group you wish to add them to from the list and drop-down menus.
  5. Click Assign.
  6. Click the hyperlink that says here.
  7. Click Submit.

The final two steps are often missed, but forgetting to complete them will result in problems with overriding the system setup configurations for the affiliates.

What are advanced features?

The Advanced Features section of the Legacy Affiliate System allows you to modify your affiliate program to be more customized with individual settings. Each option in the Advanced Feature section comes with a description that defines the system function you will be using.

For example: Bonus Level Tiering - “Establishes a tier system for incentive payouts to Affiliates as a way of motivating them to refer sales.”

What are multiple redirects?

By default our system will only allow the standard Affiliate Link to redirect ONLY to your Redirect URL (located under System Setup):

http://refer.ccbill.com/cgi-bin/clicks.cgi?CA=xxxxxx&PA=xxxxxxx

Multiple Redirects, when enabled, allow you to add a variable to the end of that Affiliate Link called HTML which will allow your affiliate to direct traffic to a specific page.

To illustrate your code when Multiple Redirects is enabled your code would look like this:

http://refer.ccbill.com/cgi-bin/clicks.cgi?CA=&PA=&HTML=http://www.sitenamehere.com/

This will circumvent the Redirect URL and directly go to the location defined after HTML=.

What is append data on redirect?

Append Data on Redirect modifies the Redirect URL (or if you have multiple redirects enabled, the value for HTML=) to contain the CA and PA values from the Affiliate Linking Code.

For example:

http://refer.ccbill.com/cgi-bin/clicks.cgi?CA=xxxxxx-0000&PA=xxxxxxxx&HTML=http://www.sitenamehere.com.

When this URL is be clicked with the Append Data on Redirect feature enabled you will be taken to

http://sitenamehere.com?CA=xxxxxx-0000&PA=xxxxxxxx.

Without the Append Data on Redirect feature you would just be taken to http://sitenamehere.com

This feature allows you to redirect to a specific script on your site and collect those values for additional tracking or metric purposes.