Track leads & customers from Affiliates in Pipedrive
Learn how to track how many leads and customers you get from Affiliates in Pipedrive
Are you struggling to track how many leads & customers you get from youaffiliate program?
If so, it’s likely a big problem for your business. If you don’t know how many leads & customers you’re getting from your affiliates and which ones are driving them, you could be wasting your precious marketing budget on things that aren’t working.
Fortunately, though, there is a solution.
In this article, we’ll show you how to use a tool called Attributer to capture affiliate data in Pipedrive. We’ll also show you a series of example reports you can run to show you which types of affiliates are performing best.
3 simple steps to track how many leads & customers you get from Affiliates in Pipedrive
With the help of Attributer, you can track how many leads and customers you're getting from your affiliate program. Here's how it works:
1. Add UTM parameters to your affiliate links
The first step is to add UTM parameters to the links you send to your affiliates.
For instance, if you want your affiliates to send people to attributer.io/integrations/pipedrive, then the URL you would give to your affiliates (with UTM parameters added) might look a bit like this:
attributer.io/integrations/pipedrive?utm_medium=affiliates&utm_source=bloggers&utm_campaign=john-smith
You can put whatever information you want in your UTMs, but we would recommend using a structure like the following:
- UTM_Medium = Affiliates
- UTM_Source= Bloggers (or the type of affiliate this is, such as bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, etc.)
- UTM_Campaign= John-Smith (or the name of the specific affiliate)
Adding UTM parameters to the links you send your affiliates can be a bit of a hassle. Fortunately, affiliate management platforms like Trackdesk or Rewardul can simplify this process by automatically including UTM parameters in the links you share with your affiliates.
Another option to explore is our free UTM builder, which offers a template for creating UTM parameters for affiliate links.
2. Add hidden fields to your forms
The next step is to add a series of hidden fields to the forms on your website (like those on your Contact Us or Request a Quote page).
You should include the following hidden fields:
- Channel
- Channel Drilldown 1
- Channel Drilldown 2
- Channel Drilldown 3
- Landing Page
- Landing Page Group
Adding hidden fields to your forms is easy if you use tools like Gravity Forms or Typeform. If you need help, there are over 50 tutorials available for popular form builders here.
3. Attributer writes the affiliate data into the hidden fields
When a visitor accesses your website through an affiliate link (with the new UTM parameters attached), Attributer stores this data in their browser. This means that they can browse around your site (or even leave and come back later) and the UTM parameters are still remembered.
If a visitor then completes a form on your site, Attributer will automatically write the affiliate details (obtained from the UTM parameters) into hidden fields within the form.
4. Affiliate data is captured and sent to Pipedrive
Finally, when the user submits the form on your website, the data that Attributer wrote into the hidden fields is captured by your form tool along with the visitor's details, including their name and email address.
Form there, sending this information to Pipedrive is simple. You can do it by integrating your form tool directly with Pipedrive (if your form tool has a direct integration), or using integration tools such as Zapier or Make.
What data gets captured in Pipedrive?
Attributer is specifically designed to gather data from UTM parameters, which means whatever information you include in UTMs (such as affiliate name, category, etc) is captured and sent to Pipedrive.
We recommend including the following information in your UTM parameters:
- UTM_Medium = Affiliates
- UTM_Source= Bloggers (or the type of affiliate this is, such as bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, etc.)
- UTM_Campaign= John-Smith (or the name of the specific affiliate)
Then the following information would be captured in Pipedrive:
- Channel = Affiliates
- Channel Drilldown 1 = Bloggers
- Channel Drilldown 2 = John Smith
On top of this, Attributer is also a really helpful tool for gathering information on leads that come from organic Google searches, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, social media, etc.
So for instance, if someone was to come to your website from an organic Google search, it would capture the following:
- Channel = Organic Search
- Channel Drilldown 1 = Google (or the name of the search engine they came from)
- Channel Drilldown 2 = www.google.com.au (or the Google domain they came from)
- Channel Drilldown 3 = Olmo Software (or whatever the keyword they used to find your business is, when available)
3 example reports you can run when you capture affiliate data in Pipedrive
Before I started at Attributer, I led marketing teams at a number of billion-dollar companies and spent a lot of time analysing where our leads and customers came from.
At a couple of those companies we ran pretty extensive affiliate programs, and the reports below are the ones I found most valuable for measuring the impact of those programs.
1. Leads by Channel
2. Customers by Affiliate Type
The above chart shows how many new customers you've gotten from your affiliate program, broken down by the type of affiliates that generated them (I.e. Blogger,s YouTubers, Podcasters, etc)
This data will help you identify which affiliates attract the most customers, and provide crucial insights to assist you in recruiting new affiliates.
3. Revenue by Affiliate
This report shows how much new revenue each of your affiliates has generated for your business.
It helps you understand who your top-performing affiliates are. You can potentially then work with them to understand why they've been so successful and find ways to support those needing extra help.
How Attributer helped William Russell scale their affiliate program
William Russell is a UK-based company that specialises in providing health and life insurance for expatriates.
They have a strong network of affiliates and use an affiliate management system to manage them. Unfortunately though, it didn't integrate with their CRM which made it difficult to understand how many leads & customers the program was generating.
But with the assistance of Attributer, they successfully addressed this issue.
They used the built-in functionality of their affiliate management tool to automatically add UTM parameters to all affiliate links. Then when someone clicked a link and became a lead, Attributer wrote the UTM parameters into the hidden fields on their forms and they were sent to their CRM.
Thanks to this approach, William Russell was able to create detailed reports within their CRM that showed how well their affiliate program was performing. They could compare the affiliate program's performance with other marketing channels, and even drill down and compare different affiliates.
"By using Attributer, we're able to track the amount of customers & revenue that come from our affiliate program, as opposed to just website visitors and leads. This has shown us that it's our most profitable channel and has helped us scale it"
William Cooper - Marketing Director @ William Russell Insurance
Wrap Up
Attributer is a great tool for extracting UTM parameters from affiliate links and sending them to Pipedrive.
With this data in your CRM, you're able to run reports that show you things like:
- How many new customers are coming from bloggers vs podcasters
- How much revenue is being generated by each affiliate
- What the lead to customer conversion rate is
- How does the average deal size of customers from your affiliate program compare to customers from your Google or Facebook Ads
- Much more!
The best part is that starting with Attributer is free and takes less than 10 minutes to set up. Don't miss out – start your 14-day free trial today!
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About the Author
Aaron Beashel is the founder of Attributer and has over 15 years of experience in marketing & analytics. He is a recognized expert in the subject and has written articles for leading websites such as Hubspot, Zapier, Search Engine Journal, Buffer, Unbounce & more. Learn more about Aaron here.