When You Might Need This?
Say for example you have a video on an external site where you want your affiliates to send the traffic. After the visitor watch the video he/she can come to your site and make a purchase.
Since the affiliate sent the traffic to an external site the affiliate plugin has no way of tracking the cookie to determine who sent the visitor. To get around this issue you can create pass thru affiliate link.
Creating Pass Thru Links
Pass thru links are links that point to your site but automatically redirects the user to the target page after it sets the cookie and tracks the click on your domain. WP Affiliate Platfrom allows you to do this. So for example your external video page is at the following URL:
http://www.example.com/myvideo
so a pass thru link will be like the following:
This will track the click for the affiliate whose ID id "tips21" then redirect the user to the "www.example.com/myvideo" page. If the visitor then comes back to your site later and makes a purchase the commission will be awarded to the affiliate whose ID is "tips21" as the cookie is already set.
You can ofcourse use a TinyURL or link shortener service to make the pass through link look short and clean.
