One of the best ways to obtain new partners is having your partners refer others. You can even incentivize referrals by providing one-time, flat commissions or ongoing percentages of their referrals’ earnings.
Setting Up Partner Referrals
Enabling a referral program for your partners is a disabled option by default, so to activate the program, go to Company > Customize Application > Settings > Partners. Then set Partner Referrals to “Enabled”. When this happens, a section will appear at the bottom of the page where you can set the standard referral rate for partners:
You have two options when deciding how to pay partners: a one-time, flat amount, or a recurring commission each billing period based on the referred partners’ earnings. If you opt to go with the flat, one-time payout, select “Flat” and enter the amount you want to pay for the referral (no currency symbols, just the currency amount.) When a partner signs up under another partner, this will credit the referring partner this flat amount after the signup is completed and the partner is approved. If you want to offer an ongoing commission for partners, then select the “Percentage” option under the Rate Type. This will show the Base Field and Rate options.
For the base field, select the value that you want to calculate your partners’ commission from. You can choose either Payout, Revenue, or Profit. Next, select the percentage amount that you want to pay. In the example above, we have opted to pay partners a recurring commission that is 10% of the payout we paid to their referring partners. For example, if a referred partner earns $1,500 in a billing period, the partner that referred them will receive a cut of $150 for that billing period as well.
Once these settings are in place, partners can then promote your partner signup page by grabbing their unique sign-up link located on their referral report. They can access this by going to Reports > Referral Report and the link will be located at the top of the page:
If you are using the old partner interface, then this link can be viewed at the bottom of the Snapshot page of the partner login. If you have opted to use a custom signup page, then this URL will be used in place of the default signup link, and the partner referral ID will be added for each partner.
Viewing Referrals
Once partners have started referring more partners to your program, you can view the list of who-referred-who in the Referrals list, viewable under Partners > Referral List. You will see a column of which partner referred to which partner, and how much the earnings are over the timeframe set in the report:
You can also view the base amount the commission is based off of as a reference.
You can also view the list of referred partners for a specific partner by going to the partner profile, and clicking “Referral List” in the Referral Commission section.
Recalculating Commissions
The referral report will automatically recalculate commissions across your network every six hours. If you have conversions that are generating payouts for a referred partner, the commission for the referring partner will update regularly every six hours, so commissions will not be real-time like the stats will be.
Switching Referring Partner
Suppose the situation arises that you need to reassign a partner’s referrer. In that case, you can quickly do this by going to the referred partner’s profile and clicking Edit in the Account Information section. At the bottom of the page, you can see the “Referred By” field. Select the new referring partner from this list and save. Commissions from this partner will be applied to the new referrer in the future. Previous commissions are still credited to the previous referrer.
Setting Custom Commissions
By default you can set the referral commissions to apply to all partners, however, this can also be overridden at the partner level if certain partners need a custom commission. This is applied to accounts that are referring other partners, meaning this rate is applied to the earnings that they referred.
With the custom commissions, you can specify if you want to offer a flat rate or a percentage of earnings on an ongoing basis. The same process applies to setting a custom payout at the partner level as for setting the default for all partners.