Conversions and comissions
What is a conversion?
A conversion is an action of interest that takes place on your site, performed by a user that comes from an Affiliate link. In most cases, the conversions are simply sales.
You have visitors in your website, which you want them to eventually perform a certain action: to buy something.
In other words, the conversion rate is the number of visitors that turn into buyers.
With Affiliate Tracker for Joomla!, you can see how many sales you actually make to buyers provided by your affiliates
Why do we call it "conversion" and not "sale"?
A conversion does not necessary need to be a sale, that is, an action with monetary value (although, in most cases, it is).
Sometimes we can be interested in tracking other types of actions, for example, user registrations or even document downloads. We may want to know how many new user registrations came from an affiliate link, because this may have a value to us. This example illustrates a conversion which is not a sale.
What is a comission?
A comission is the monetary value that we assign to a given conversion.
For example, if the conversion is a sale, the comission will usually be a percentage of the total value of the sale, or maybe just a flat rate, previosly agreed with the affiliate.
We can also assign monetary value to a conversion that is not sale: for example, the merchant and the affiliate agree that the former will pay the later $1 for each new user registration on his site that provides from a visitor referred by the affiliate.
Conversions and comissions in Affilate Tracker
In Affiliate Tracker for Joomla, the administrator (the merchant) can decide which actions he wants to track (VirtueMart sales, PayPlans subscriptions...), and can agree with each affiliate which comission will be given for each conversion.
The conversion can be automatically approved by the system (if so set), or can require the approval of the administator. In the same way, the merchant can change the comission value at any point in the process.
A merchant can "become his own affiliate"
There's a very interestig approach in using Affiliate Tracker as a report tool for your own use.
Imagine a scenario where the site's administrator (you) place an ad in another site. You may have paid for this ad, and you want to know if the money generated by this ad is greater or smaller than the cost of the ad itself.
If you set an affiliate account for yourself, and use the affiliate link for the ad, you will see how many visitors this ad provides to your site, how many sales you make thanks to it, and how many money you make from it.
With Affiliate Tracker, you can monitorize these referrals for your own use to analyze how good your ads are doing!
