Do you have two websites for your eCommerce business? One where you promote your business, the Marketing Site, and the other one where you actually sell your products, memberships or services, the eCommerce Site.
If this is your setup, you will most probably want affiliates to refer users to your Marketing Site, instead of your eCommerce Site.
If that’s the case, you may notice that referred users to the Marketing Site will not result in visits and conversions of the eCommerce Site.
Why is that?
Simply because there are two websites and they are not connected. SliceWP, being installed on the eCommerce site, cannot communicate with the Marketing Site.
This is where the Cross-site Tracking add-on comes into play.
How does the add-on work?
This add-on is a bridge between your Marketing Site and your eCommerce Site. Even though it’s an add-on for SliceWP, it won’t be installed on the eCommerce Site as the other add-ons, but on the Marketing Site.
Once the add-on is installed and configured, it will modify any links leading to your eCommerce Site into referral links.
This will of course only happen when a visitor reaches your website through one of your affiliate’s referral links. If someone reaches your website directly, the add-on will not modify the leading links.
Limitations
- Because visits are tracked on the eCommerce Site, where SliceWP is installed, referred visits will not be tracked when visitors reach your Marketing Site. Only once a referred visitor clicks on a link that redirects them to the eCommerce will the visit be registered.
- Tracking between the Marketing Site and the eCommerce Site currently works only with query based referral links. If you have the “Friendly Affiliate URLs” option enabled, from SliceWP > Settings > General (tab) > Affiliate URL Settings (section), visits will not be registered.
How do I set up the add-on?
To install and set up the Cross-site Tracking add-on, follow these steps:
- Install and activate the add-on on your Marketing Site. To gain access to the add-on you will need a Pro or Pro Plus license. Click here to purchase your license.
- Navigate to your Marketing Site’s admin area > Settings > Cross-site Referral Tracking.
- Here, set the URL for your eCommerce Site in the Target Website URL. All links starting with this URL will be modified when a referred visitor reaches your website.
- Then, in the same page, set the Affiliate Keyword, Credit First/Last Affiliate and Cookie Duration options to match the ones you’ve set in SliceWP on your eCommerce website.
That’s it! Give the site a quick test to make sure everything is working nicely.