One of the best ways to obtain new partners is to have 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:
When deciding how to pay partners, you have two options: a one-time, flat amount or a recurring commission each billing period based on the referred partners’ earnings. If you opt for 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 partners an ongoing commission, select the “Percentage” option under the Rate Type. This will show the Base Field and Rate options.
For the base field, select the value for which you want to calculate your partners’ commission. 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 of 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 also receive a cut of $150 for that billing period.
Once these settings are in place, partners can promote your partner signup page by grabbing their unique link 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, 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, this URL will replace the default 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 on 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 platform every six hours. If you have conversions 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 in which you need to reassign a partner’s referrer. You can quickly do that by visiting 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. 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 rate is applied to accounts that refer other partners, meaning it is applied to the earnings that they refer.
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.