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Tracking referred visits from existing affiliate URLs

Track referred visits when customers using an old affiliate link

Charles Rosel avatar
Written by Charles Rosel
Updated over a week ago

If you migrated from another platform to Rewardful and the affiliate link from your previous platform uses a different URL parameter compared to the one used by Rewardful, our platform can still track visits using the link format used by your previous affiliate program platform.

I. Introduction to Rewardful affiliate links

The affiliate link format from your previous platform might be formatted like this:

https://www.yourlandingpage.com/?ref=token

The default Rewardful affiliate link would be formatted as:

https://www.yourlandingpage.com/?via=token

Notice that Rewardful uses ?via instead of ?ref URL parameter. This means that if customers use the old/previous affiliate link, Rewardful will not be able to track those visits by default.

II. Modifying the tracking script

The Rewardful tracking script needs to be modified to recognize and track visits coming from URLs that do not use the parameter ?via. To implement this, you would need to add another parameter. The default Rewardful tracking script is:

<script>(function(w,r){w._rwq=r;w[r]=w[r]||function(){(w[r].q=w[r].q||[]).push(arguments)}})(window,'rewardful');</script> 
<script async src='https://r.wdfl.co/rw.js' data-rewardful='APIKEY'></script>

You would need to add a parameter in the tracking script called data-rewardful-params and specify the URL parameters that our tracking script should recognize:

<script>(function(w,r){w._rwq=r;w[r]=w[r]||function(){(w[r].q=w[r].q||[]).push(arguments)}})(window,'rewardful');</script> 
<script async src='https://r.wdfl.co/rw.js' data-rewardful='APIKEY' data-rewardful-params="rfsn, ref"></script>

From the example modification above, the attribute data-rewardful-params was added after the data-rewardful="APIKEY" attribute. It has a value of rfsn and ref which means our tracking script would recognize visits from affiliate links using a different parameter:

https://www.yourlandingpage.com/?rfsn=token

https://www.yourlandingpage.com/?ref=token

You can add multiple parameters that you want our tracking script to recognize, within the double quotes ("") of the attribute data-rewardful-params.

III. Limitations

  • When importing affiliate accounts via our API or via support, the affiliate token or value of the parameter should match the existing affiliate account e.g. if the existing affiliate account has a token abc123, you should indicate the token value as abc123. If it is different, the visit using the old affiliate link will not be tracked.

  • UTM parameters cannot be used for tracking visits.

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