Set up your Partner Global Settings to determine how to pay partners for their commissions, what kinds of referrals earn commissions and more. Here’s how.
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Setting up Partner Global Settings
- What to consider when deciding how you’ll pay your partners
- Our tips for setting up your pay limit
- How to determine who gets credit for commissions
- Our strategy for choosing when cookies expire
- The way to apply these settings across multiple partner programs (if you have more than one)
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Transcript
Before you build your first partner program, set your partner global settings. They control how you pay your partners and which partner gets credit for a sale. They apply to every partner program you create, so you only set them once. Each program also has its own settings, which we'll cover next.
First, make sure partner programs are on. Click your profile icon, then Administration, then Advanced Features, and toggle on Partner programs.
Then hover over Partners in the main navigation, and click Settings, then Global settings. There are four settings here.
The first is "I'll pay partners by." Choose PayPal, Check, or your partner's choice. Ontraport tracks what you owe, but it never sends money for you. If you pay by PayPal, Ontraport gives you a PayPal mass pay file, which you upload to PayPal to pay many partners at once.
For that to work, each partner needs a PayPal address on their contact record.
Next is the pay threshold. That's how much commission a partner needs to earn before you pay them. For example, set it to fifty dollars, and you're not sending lots of tiny payments. You need a threshold if you pay by PayPal. You can't download a partner's mass pay file until they reach it.
Third, "Commission is paid to." Sometimes more than one partner refers the same person, so you decide who gets paid: the first referrer or the last referrer. Every contact record tracks both.
The first referrer is the partner whose link a new contact clicked before they first opted in or bought. That never changes. If you pay the first referrer, partners are motivated to bring in new leads, because the commission is locked in. The trade-off is that they may stop supporting those contacts, since they can't lose the commission. And if someone signed up without a referral link, there's no first referrer to pay.
The last referrer updates every time a contact clicks a partner's link and then fills out an opt-in or order form. If you pay the last referrer, partners keep promoting your products to protect future sales. The trade-off is less reason to bring in new leads, and some partners may hold off on mailing early in a launch. One exception: on subscriptions, the commission stays with the partner who made the original sale.
Neither choice is right for everyone. Pick the one that fits how you sell, and tell your partners the rule up front.
The last setting is "Cookies will expire." When a lead clicks a partner's link, a partner cookie goes into their browser. Choose whether those cookies expire. If they do, partners only get credit for purchases made before the cookie runs out. Say your cookies expire after a week. If a lead clicks a link and buys eight days later, the partner doesn't get credit. A longer window gives partners credit for buyers who take longer to decide.
When you're done, click Save in the top right corner.
Later, you can see who referred whom in each program's Referrals tab, or on the Referral Info tab of a partner's contact record.
So: choose how you'll pay, set your pay threshold, decide whether the first or last referrer earns the commission, and set your cookie expiration. Next up, let's create your first partner program.
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