SplitCommission™ is a great new feature of Post Affiliate Pro which enables your company to reward all the affiliates who participate in referring a particular sale. Improve your affiliate program dramatically now!

This is an example of how a situation can arise that calls for multiple sales commissions to be paid out:

"Visitor John" was browsing Dave’s Blog and was interested in Dave’s Blog’s link to the “100xroi.com” website. Visitor John clicks through to the “100xroi.com” website from Dave’s Blog.

Visitor John then browses the “best-product.com” website, and exits after 5 minutes.
Visitor John decides to research “best-product.com” to get some reviews, references, or pricing information.
Furthering his search, Visitor John finds the website “100xroi-review.com,” and again views the “best-product.com” website, but he’s now viewing from the site of affiliate Tom, review writer.

Visitor John searches again, and finds a forum entry, where affiliate Mike has made positive statements about “100xroi.com”. At this point, Visitor John has been referred yet again by reading the positive things affiliate Mike has declared in the forum.
 

Visitor John then makes the purchase decision, and he finally becomes a customer of “100xroi.com".

Based on the “first and last referrer” setting, commission goes to Dave (first referrer) or Mike (last referrer). Both options allow all common affiliate software with rewrite cookie options.

In the Standard Affiliate Commission Structure, Dave, from “Dave’s Blog gets paid the entire commission, yet Tom, the reviewer, and Mike, the affiliate, help to guide Visitor John towards his purchase decision with “best-product.com. Every affiliate involved positively impacted “Visitor John” and played an integral part in promoting the sale. All of these affiliates deserve to be compensated for their efforts.

SplitCommission™ offers the ability to define multiple variations of how affiliates can be rewarded:

Option 1) Flat, split commission for all
All three affiliates from the example, get paid equal commissions.

Option 2) First referrer is the key to success
First referrer receives a 60% bonus, and the remaining two affiliates who participated in the sale split the 40% difference, or 20% each.

Option 3) Last referrer is key to success
The last referrer is rewarded a 60% bonus, and the remaining two affilliates are each paid 20% of the remaining 40% balance.

Option 4) The first and last referring affiliates are considered the key elements of success
First affiliate - Gets a 50% bonus
Last affiliate - Gets a 30% bonus
Additional affiliates - Each gain 20%

NOTE: SplitCommission™ allows also traditional setup, if you set first referrer bonus to 100% no other commissions will be paid out on the sale.

The key to a successful affiliate program is motivating all affiliates with compensation. When all affiliates are motivated to promote your products, your SEO will increase, and that will equate to more sales.

Compensation through comissions are the chief motivating factor for affiliates.

With SplitCommission™ your affiliates will see some percentage of commission from each sale they refer, and that success will motivate them to promote more steadily and with increased commitment, increasing commissions overall.

The most important key to success in your affiliate confidence is the quality and accuracy of program tracking.

With SplitCommission’s special, customizable feature, affiliates will quickly understand that shared commissions, when warranted, equal higher commission checks. Your affiliates may even recruit others by spreading the word.

Split commission feature will always divide the calculated commission to the number of affiliates that referred the particular sale. First and last affiliate bonus means how many % of the commission will be awarded to first or last referring affiliate as bonus commission. In our example first affiliate will receive 25% bonus and last affiliate 50% bonus. So when we add these bonuses together we have 75% of the commission awarded to bonuses, therefore we will split remaining 25% to all 5 affiliates. That's $5 for every affiliate + first affiliate will receive $25 bonus and last affiliate will receive $50 bonus. You can also set the minimum commission that needs to be calculated for one affiliate in order to save this commission. If you set it to let's say 10$ in our example, only first and last affiliate out of 5 will receive commission because affiliate 2, 3, 4 didn't reach the minimum commission value.

1. affiliate: 5$ + 25$ = 30$
2. affiliate: 5$
3. affiliate: 5$
4. affiliate: 5$
5. affiliate: 5$ + 50$ = 55$
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together:                   100$

After configuring Split commission settings don't forget to hit the save button. Now, here are few more examples which are commonly used:

1.) All commission for first / last referring affiliate - we recommend you to use standard overwrite cookies setting to achieve this, you can deactivate Split Commissions feature. If you want to reward only first affiliate that referred sale, go to your merchant panel > configuration > cookies > deselect Overwrite Cookies checkbox. If you want to reward only last affiliate that referred sale, go to your merchant panel > configuration > cookies > select Overwrite Cookies checkbox. You can configure this setting also differently for each of your campaign in edit campaign > edit details > Cookies

2.) No bonus = equal split for all referring affiliates - if you don't want to reward first / last affiliate with a bonus commission, but you want to split the commission to all referring affiliates equally, then simply leave the first and last affiliate bonus fields empty (0 = Undefined) 

2.) No bonus = equal split for all referring affiliates - if you don't want to reward first / last affiliate with a bonus commission, but you want to split the commission to all referring affiliates equally, then simply leave the first and last affiliate bonus fields empty (0 = Undefined)

3.) Commission for first and last affiliate only (example: 50/50) - if you want to reward only your first and last referring affiliate and not the affiliates in between, then simply distribute the whole commission to bonuses for first and last affiliate.

4.) Bonus for last only and split the rest (example: 20/80)- if you want to split the commission between all referring affiliates plus reward the last referring affiliate with a small bonus (this affiliate had his last word and persuaded the client to purchase) then simply fill in only the last affiliate bonus field with a percentage that will be awarded to the last referring affiliate as bonus. This affiliate will receive also the share of the rest commission. (rest = commission - bonus)

5.) Split commissions with performance groups and multi-tier affiliates (different commission settings for various affiliates) - in this case the commission that splits isn't predefined, but rather the commission is calculated for each affiliate separately from the total cost value. In our next example we have $1000 total cost value, 5 referring affiliates (referral order is from affiliate 1 as first referring and affiliate 5 as last referring, after referral 5, the sale occurred). Our split commission settings are as followed: bonus commission for first affiliate is 30%, for the last referring affiliate the bonus is 20%

We have also several commission groups: first referring affiliate is in 50% commission group, everybody else is in default 30% commission group. Affiliate number 3 has also a second tier parent that has commission setting set to 5%. In next steps I will try to explain calculating of final commissions for each affiliate and also parent affiliate step by step.

On our first image we can see affiliates and their split commission bonus percentage:

As you can see, the bonus commission for affiliate 1 and 2 is equal to 50%, this means that 50% of total commission will be given to affiliate 1 (30%) and affiliate 2 (20%). On the next picture we can see that the remaining 50% of total commission will be divided equally between all affiliates (10%).

Updated: Dec 2011