Need Help on Affiliate Program Project

Hi , I've been asked by my boss to work on a simple affiliate program for our portal. I do understand the entire concept of affiliate programs etc but technically I'm stuck.

So far our basic plan is that our affiliates send out emails to potential customers who then if interested sign up and pay for their membership on our portal. I'm kinda stuck on how to track the information of visitors and visitors who sign up with respect to whether they were referred or not and if they were referred then by whom.

Initially I worked on the idea of affiliates sending out preset emails containing a link to the website with the affiliates id included in the url as a parameter. But thats only plausible in situations when a customer clicks on the link in the email and continues to sign up from there. I mean lets say the customer visits the site and doesn't sign up immediately only to signup a few days later - I don't seem to think of any way to track this information as to whether the customer came through a referral or not. Any ideas out there guys

Why not just ask them who refered them?

The best solution is to pass an affiliate id as a parameter (as you said) and once it gets to the page, have the page store that id in a cookie. Then, anytime that user goes to the site for the next X days (life of the cookie), even if they didn't come directly from a referral link the last person who referred them will get credit.

This is how most affiliate programs operate. Exactly like that.

You could give the affiliates a 'referral code', a type of password they could give to people they refer and when the person signs up they put in that code. store the code in the database and compare them.

Affiliates want to KNOW they're going to get paid. To rely on the people they refer to type in their special code is unacceptable. I don't know what product they are selling or to what scale he's talking, but if it's to the extent of other webmasters putting banners or links to their website for purchases then that method is not going to work. Every major affiliate program assigns each affiliate a unique ID that gets passed in the url (eg: www.site.com?refer=007) and that id is stored in a cookie. Upon every sale, the site checks to see if either

a) there is referal id set as a url parameter
- or -
b) therei s a referal id set in a cookie

and if so it gives credit to said referrer.

Just my $.02

a lot of people set their browser to block third party cookies, or clear their cookies every once in a while. also, if you just ask people who referred them (which would be my choice), they may not go to the trouble of entering in the information to make someone else money (unless they get some sort of savings because of it). and you can't store their ip address in a database with the referral id the first time they come, because a lot of people don't have static ip addresses.

there's really no fool-proof way of doing it, but a combination of asking them, and cookies pre-filling that field if cookies were accepted by the browser and not cleared in the mean-time might be a good set-up.

I think I got the idea of how to pull this off. I guess I am putting too much unwarranted effort - besides we won't be planning on having a very extensive affiliate network anyway.

Thanks for the input guys.