How to do Affiliate Marketing with Catalog?

[olaf1]

I am working with an organization that wants to implement affiliate marketing for their course offerings.

Requirements are pretty much "standard":

There will be partners, that promote certain courses and provide links to their customers. Once a course is sold to a customer who followed a link that one of these parters provided, that partner will receive commision.

So, in technical terms, what would be needed is a way to create affiliate links/codes, which are tracked by Catalog. Also, there needs to be some sort of reporting of revenue by affiliate, so that commission can be calculated.

I didn't find anything in the docs or here, so any input is appreciated 🙂

Thanks,
Olaf

[VeyLaurenc]

It's great to hear that you're working on implementing affiliate marketing for your organization's course offerings.

[hechla]

This is pretty interesting and I'm new to Catalog but my brain started thinking of options... I have no idea if any of them would work well. 

Could it be done with promotion codes? Give a very slight discount to those who were referred from an affiliate and then track the promotion code? 

I assume that not every customer of the specific course will come from the affiliate marketing? So some will be customers who just happen to find the course by browsing and searching? If not, and all customers will be referred from the affiliate, you could create a new course in Canvas just for the affiliate.  You could then create the listing but have the visibility be link only so it isn't displayed on the Catalog home page but it accessible via the direct link.  🤷

You could use a URL shortener service like bit.ly or similar and track through that? 

Sorry if these ideas aren't too helpful. Like I said... I read your post and my brain just started going. 

[AmosLewis]

It's definitely a great way to reach new audiences and increase sales. In terms of the technical requirements, it sounds like you'll need a system that can create and track affiliate links/codes, as well as provide reporting on revenue by affiliate.
Have you considered looking into solutions such as transformagency.com? They specialize in Magento and might have some great tools that could work well for your organization.
Best of luck with the implementation!