HeatSpring Affiliate program

Yes! We now have the ability to add as many account managers to your affiliate account as needed. Just let us know who you'd like to add and we will take care of it. Affiliate account managers will be able to see:

• Tracking analyitcs reports
• Tracking links
• Affiliate courses
• Affiliate agreement

Affiliate managers will not be able to access or update vendor details. Vendor details will continue to be accessible only to the affiliate account owner. The vendor and affiliate account owner will also receive email notifications about earning commissions, bill payments and earning statements.

If you'd like to join the affiliate program, let us know and we will set up an account for you and send over all the details.

The quick summary of how it all works is that HeatSpring creates special tracking links for each affiliate that can be used to promote the courses. Then when anyone clicks one of those links, the affiliate earns a 20% commission (after credit card fees) on any course(s) purchased within a year of last clicking a tracking link. The affiliate receives an email each time they earn a commission and affiliates can also track earnings and analytics on the account dashboard. We pay out earnings quarterly and will provide a detailed statement with each payment.

Here are the key steps:

1. Join the HeatSpring affilate program
2. Look through our course catalog and find courses that align with your community’s interests, goals, and needs.
3. Share courses with your network and community via email, web ads & social channels using special tracking links generated from our in-house affiliate platform.
4. Earn a commission whenever someone clicks on your special tracking link and purchases any course within 365 days (even if it’s a different course than the one you promoted). We offer very competitive commission rates!
5. Get paid your affiliate commissions quarterly via direct deposit through our ePayment system.

The HeatSpring affiliate program been running since 2016 and in that time we've seen some patterns emerge about which affiliates tend to be most successful. Here are some examples of the most successful affiliates on HeatSpring:

• Existing HeatSpring Instructors who promote their courses through their networks, in their email footer and LinkedIn bio and to their email list
• Media Companies with trade publications and an audience of building professionals interested training
• Industry Associations who want to promote high quality education for their audience
• Training Organizations who want to provide additional training content to their customers

Once your affilate account has been set up on HeatSpring, there are multiple ways to find your special tracking links. For all options you will first need to be logged into your account at www.heatspring.com/account and your account must be an owner or manager of the affilaite account.

1. View All Tracking Links
   • Click "Affiliate Home" from the drop down menu under your name in the upper left hand corner
   • Click "Tracking Links" tab
2. Get a tracking link for any HeatSpring.com page, browse to the page then either:
   • Click "Track This Page" from the menu under your name in the upper left hand corner and copy the url from the browser's address bar.
   • OR - scroll to the very bottom of any HeatSpring page and you should see the affiliate tracking link for that page in the footer
3. Request a short url from Brian
   • We have the ability to create shortened urls if you plan to have one affiliate url that you use everywhere, just ask Brian to generate it.

Tracking URL Structure

The special tracking link must include the "aff_id" paramenter set in the url. For example:

The parameter is this part after the "?":

Where aff_id is the parameter name and hfxdj8 is the parameter value. The value here is the id for the Affiliate account so that always stays the same on every one of your tracking links and must be included in order for the link to properly work.

Related Articles

• Advanced Affiliate Tracking: Including Source Parameter
• Running Reports: Understanding the Affiliate Analytics Report

This is an advanced option which is not required in order to use our affiliate tracking links, please first read our getting started with tracking links article. Similar to google utm_source parameter tracking, our affiliate tracking link analytics can now be seperated by source by using the "aff_source" parameter.

By default every affiliate tracking url includes the "aff_id" parameter. For example

The parameter is this part after the "?":

Where aff_id is the parameter name and hfxdj8 is the parameter value. The value here is the id for the Affiliate account so that always stays the same on every one of your tracking links.

The second, optional parameter named aff_source can be provided a value. Some examples could be:

The second parameter is included using a "&" so this would be the full url for the email source:

As you start adding multiple courses and want to keep track of multiple sources and campaigns you might create a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet can be helpful for and keeping track of which source values map to which marketing campaigns.

The one important thing to keep in mind is consistency of the values you use over time. So for example aff_source=email and aff_source=e-mail are two individual sources that will be tracked separately. This is another reason why the spreadsheet can be helpful. The value also has to only use accepted url characters, so it's best to just stick with letters, hyphen and underscore with no spaces.

Here is a good general resource on url structure and parameters if you want to understand more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string.

Related Articles

• Getting Started with Tracking Links
• Running Reports: Understanding the Affiliate Analytics Report

Once you have been set up with an affiliate account, you can log in at https://heatspring.com/account and then choose the "affiliate home" option from the dropdown menu under your name. You will then see a blue "analytics" tab. From here you can run the affiliate analytics report which will be generated and emailed to you. This article will help define some of terms and data included in this report.

General Terms

All user counts shown on the reports are "unique" which means if the same user clicks more than once we only count one unique user. The data shown in the report detail is from each user's last click. We also provide seperate metrics for "unique visitors" and "unique valid people" as defined here:

Unique Visitors

Unique visitors are clicks from unique users identified by their browser, but who do not necessarily have or create a HeatSpring account. The "unique visitors referred" metric shows total clicks happening on the tracking links, mostly by humans but also some by bots. Some users are browsing and don't find what they want. Some people log into their HeatSpring accounts and when they do we tie the affiliate referral to the account.

Unique Valid People

Unique valid people are individuals identified by their HeatSpring account, we refer to them in the system as People, who are still within their 12 months window before their affiliate referral click expires. The "Unique Valid People Referred" metric shows total clicks where the user has been connected to either a new or an existing HeatSpring account. Once we have the affiliate referral tied to the person's account then we are able to show the last click by source data on this report and show where the click originated and track if a conversion occurs.

Column Definitions

In the section of the report under the Unique Valid People last click by source past 12 months heading you'll see several columns. They are defined below:

aff_source column

If you use advanced tracking parameters and the aff_source parameter in your HeatSpring affiliate tracking links, this column will display the results tracked through this parameter. If there is not an aff_source parameter used, we will also save any referral website we receive in the request so you may see websites listed in this column even if you are not used the advanced tracking parameters.

current column

If the person has “last click” listed in the "current" column then they are still a valid referral and your affiliate account will continue to earn commissions on their purchases. If they have “not last” listed, then that person has clicked on some other affiliate’s tracking link (after clicking yours) and is no longer valid. They would need to click another one of your tracking links to become valid again.

conversion column

If the person has "true" listed in the "conversion" column then they have purchased one or more courses under your affiliate account.

earnings column

The amount listed here is the total earnings paid to your affiliate account in commissions for purchased made by this person.

expires column

The date listed here is the date the last click expires from this referral, if they click a new link this date will reset to expire 1 year after the click.

Related Articles

• Getting Started with Tracking Links
• Advanced Affiliate Tracking: Including Source Parameter