Webgains is pleased to announce the launch of its Voucher Tool, both for merchants and affiliates.
The increasing popularity of voucher use has been a matter of raising concern for affiliates and merchants over the past few months. Of particular concern are problems regarding the use, monitoring and promotion of vouchers through the affiliate channel. Affiliates are concerned about their exclusive vouchers being used by other affiliates; merchants are concerned about paying more than they can afford if an unauthorised voucher is used by affiliates or an exclusive affiliate voucher by a different and unauthorised affiliate.
The Webgains Voucher Tool resolves these issues and will further enhance the voucher sector in affiliate marketing by providing:
•A concise overview of available vouchers with start & expiry dates, individual commission per voucher & all the promotional details
•Voucher-based tracking as last referrer
•Product-specific voucher use & relevant commission attribution
•Reporting on voucher use for each order
•Offline marketing tracked & reported online based on voucher use
The Voucher Tool works by the merchant using our new tracking system and reporting the voucher usage details per order or per product. The merchant will have already uploaded the various exclusive & generic vouchers onto our system with their relevant commissions and Webgains will do the rest by combining the information.
Voucher Tool for affiliates
The voucher tool is yet another place, in addition to the affiliates4u forum posts & the Webgains blog posts, for affiliates to get voucher information. It gives you the ability to see all the codes, not just the generic ones, but those created just for you, and you don’t have to keep referring back to your emails or complicated spreadsheets!
Within the Webgains system, the Voucher Tool is located under the Programs tab, named Voucher Codes. From there, you will be able to see all the available vouchers for each program you are joined to and enabled to use the tool, broken down by availability: generic & exclusive codes. The exclusive codes will be visible to the relevant affiliate only. The merchant will have specified the voucher code, the start & expiry dates, the details of the promotion, the destination url (with a nice little shortcut to the text/deep link generator if you wish to use it immediately!) and the specified commission for the voucher (the program’s default commission, a fixed percentage or a fixed amount). Once the voucher has expired, it will be removed from that list unless the merchant changes the expiration date.
If a voucher exclusive to you has been used in the order, that transaction will be attributed to you overriding cookie data, preventing other affiliates from using your exclusive voucher. Please note that the code is exclusive to your affiliate account, not your campaign. You can choose to use the voucher on all your sites, but reporting will be on the default campaign only. If you want a separate code for each campaign, just ask!
Voucher codes are reported in the Webgains system exactly as the merchant inputs them, in order to avoid problems with case sensitive systems. Please advertise them exactly as they are exported on the Voucher Tool.
Vouchers that are not to be used by you are not black listed, but will have 0% commission specified by the merchant. You can still choose to use them and we will track and report the orders, but they will not earn you commission.
The voucher code used will also be reported in each order’s details page, so that you can easily see which codes perform well for you. Once we have the first few merchants using the voucher tracking system, the reporting will be further enhanced by extended reports on the vouchers themselves.
The voucher tool offers the opportunity for
offline marketing to be tracked online. As we don’t need the cookie data for exclusive vouchers, if a customer uses online the code they saw being advertised offline, you will earn the commission. This should open up a whole new world of marketing to creative and entrepreneurial affiliates.
To view the programs using the voucher tool you can check in the affiliate area: Programs-->Search Programs-->Voucher code enabled: Yes/No. You can also see which programs have vouchers available in the ‘programs joined/not joined’ area, where there is a new tick box in the Choose columns. Also, in the ‘program details’ screen, if using the new system, there will be a link called ‘Get Vouchers’ next to the ‘Get Links’ button. Finally, all programs to upgrade their tracking code will be announced on our blog and the forum.
Voucher Tool for merchants
The Voucher Tool gives Webgains merchants a much easier way to distribute their vouchers, reward their affiliates and monitor voucher use, than has been available so far. Previously, you had to treat voucher orders as a different type of order and pay different commissions. With this new tool, Webgains will do all the work for you!
The Webgains Voucher Tool is now live in the affiliate area. We are in the process of contacting all our merchants to upgrade their tracking codes so that they can start using the tool. We will be announcing each merchant individually when they have successfully upgraded their tracking and are ready to rock and roll.
As we get the first few merchants using the tool, we will upgrade the reporting to include vouchers in the various reports on our system. At the same time, we will be adding alerts to affiliates to notify them of new vouchers made available.
We are aware of the issues the new tool could potentially cause for affiliates by overriding their click data or not awarding commission on specific vouchers used. Although not perfect, this is the first step to address issues regarding voucher management for merchants & affiliates. We are investigating various options of resolving these issues and as always we are waiting for your ideas & feedback.
The Webgains Voucher Tool has been designed to help merchants and voucher-using affiliates work more closely together and in a more efficient way. It has been developed as a result of discussions with voucher affiliates and merchants and we would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their help & feedback while building the tool. And a very big thank you to our developer, Andrew, as well.
We look forward to your feedback on our new feature so please don’t hesitate to
contact us with all your questions and comments.
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