Welcome to Commission Monster's technical section. The following is a simple guide with the intended purpose of making it easy for webmasters to insert the Commission Monster tracking pixel on your order confirmation page.
Technology Background
Commission Monster uses a cookie based method to track sales, leads and clicks through it's network. Cookies are the most popular form of affiliate tracking as they provide a great solution to the stateless nature of the http protocol. In short when an internet user clicks your link on an affiliate's website the user will be transported to our server briefly where a cookie is set in their browser before our server redirects them to your website.
You need to place our tracking pixel on your thank you page. This will be the page where the desired action has been completed like “your order number is xxxx” or “thank you for completing our survey”. If the internet user buys something from your website or completes a lead action when shown this page the <img> tag will execute a script that checks the internet users computer for our cookie. If the cookie indicates that the user was sent from an affiliate's website our system will credit the affiliate and debit your account for the respective amount due.
Now that you have a basic understanding of the process and our technology we have provided a simple guide to implementing our tracking pixel on your website.
 The Tracking Pixel
There are 4 main components to the tracking pixel;
• Campaign ID #
• Total Sale Amount (exclusive of GST & Shipping costs)
• Transaction
• Optional Information (like client ID# or other information for internal use)
Campaign ID #
This will be provided by us. It is a unique positive integer that identifies your tracking pixel to our system.
Total Sale Amount
This value needs to be parsed in by your system; the value must be numeric with two decimal places and no currency symbols.
Transaction #
This value also needs to be parsed in by your system; the value should be a positive integer and provide us with the transaction or order number that your system tagged the sale with so that when we need to make alterations or audit transactions we know how to refer to the sale.
Optional Information
This value is optional and can be used by you to place additional information relevant to the transaction into our system for retrieval at a later date; this feature would allow you to monitor customer ID# etc for all transactions made via your affiliate program with us.
A Pixel Example:
This pixel shows an example of a pixel for campaign number 23 for a sale value of $9.95 with a transaction ID# of 182 and the optional information being used to indicate the sale was made by customer #1.
<IMG SRC="http://members.commissionmonster.com/track_sale/23/9.95/182/1">
NB* Be very sure to use the correct campaign ID#
Environments Using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
Depending on the nature of the page that you display the pixel on you may want to take advantage of our SSL certificate to avoid warnings to users about unsecured content on the page. To implement this you can call the pixel over SSL by changing the “http” in the source of the image tag to “https” (for example: from src=”http:// to src=”https:// ) the “s” is used to establish a secure connection.
Code Samples
If you are technically minded these coded samples should help you to understand the concept behind the pixel implementation. In the provided samples the variable cartId is your transaction ID# and the variable total is the total value of the sale as described above.
PHP Sample
<IMG SRC=http://members.commissionmonster.com/track_sale/23/<?php print $total ?>/<?php print $cartId ?>/optional_information>
ASP Sample
<IMG SRC=http://members.commissionmonster.com/track_sale/23/<% = total %>/<% = cartId %>/optional_information>
Cold Fusion Sample
<IMG SRC=http://members.commissionmonster.com/track_sale/23/ # total # / # cartId # /optional_information>
Troubleshooting
The implementation should take less than half an hour as it is based on the same notion of adding an image to the thank you page. Please consult your shopping cart manual or vendor for information regarding the particular setup of your thank you page and variable names etc. If you are still having difficulties in setting up your affiliate program please contact us and we will be able to liaise with you or your technical staff to implement and test the tracking pixel.
Post Pixel Implementation
Now that you have implemented the pixel on your order confirmation page you need to complete a test sale using our test affiliate account who's ID is 11. You can do this by clicking the link below and completing a sale at your own store.
 http://members.commissionmonster.com/z/76/11
If your sale has worked it will have appeared in the statistics section of your Commission Monster clients login area. Please notify us that you have placed your first test sale so that we can make sure that everything is fully functional.
NB* Remember to remove your Commission Monster cookies from your machine after completing the test sale to avoid sale duplications as you use your system.
If you are having any difficulties in setting up your affiliate program please make contact with us.
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