Affiliate Display Settings
Note: This article only applies to NATS version 4.1 and higher. If you wish to upgrade your installation of NATS in order to take advantage of this feature, please put in a support ticket.
The NATS4 Affiliate Settings page lets you customize a wide variety of different options that affect your affiliate account in NATS. This allows for a much more user-friendly and user-input based interface, in order to provide the most comfortable and familiar user experience.
Through the “Display Settings” section of the “Affiliate Settings” page, affiliates can change how certain things are displayed by default in NATS, including linkcodes and statistics.
Finding Your Affiliate Settings
The NATS Affiliate Settings page can be found under the "My Account" section in the toolbar at the top of every affiliate-side page. Just mouse over "My Account" and click the Settings link in the pop-down menu that appears. You can also mouse over the Settings link to find links that take you directly to any of the settings pages in NATS.
This will take you to the "Display Settings" page, where you can affect how certain items in NATS are displayed by default. At the top of the section, you will see three tabs. The available sections here are:
- Display Settings - Allows you to change how your linkcodes and statistics reports are displayed by default.
- E-mail Settings - Allows you to choose which member actions cause NATS to send you an automatic e-mail.
- Notification Settings - Allows you to choose which member actions trigger internal notifications in NATS, as well as whether you wish to use external postback scripts with NATS.
Clicking on the "Settings" link brings you to the Display Settings page by default, where you can change aspects of the NATS look and feel.
Display Settings
The "Display Settings" page is broken up into three sections -- Linkcode Settings, Statistics Settings, and Session Settings. These allow you to affect how various aspects of the NATS affiliate pages are displayed, as well as what information is displayed on them. You can also tell NATS to remember certain affiliate information here.
Linkcode Settings
Linkcode Settings affect how Affiliate Linkcodes are displayed in NATS by default. Click the "Modify" button in the top-right corner of the section to edit your default settings.
Use this section to choose how you want your linkcodes displayed by default, and what program, campaign, and site you want your linkcodes to be associated with. The settings here are similar to the Linkcode Settings found on the Affiliate Adtools pages.
You can choose from a variety of different ways to display your linkcodes with the "Link Style" drop-down menu. This includes Encoded, Un-Encoded, and Shortname -- for more information on these linkcode types, please see our NATS4 Affiliate Link Codes wiki article.
In addition to the standard link styles offered, NATS 4.1 also offers the ability to attach the HTML code that is necessary in order to provide surfers with hyperlinks containing your affiliate linkcode. Just choose the Encoded with HTML, Un-Encoded with HTML, or the Shortname with HTML options from the drop-down menu here to grab hyperlinked linkcodes. If you just want the URL for your affiliate linkcodes without any HTML code attached, choose the Encoded, Un-Encoded, or Shortname options from this menu.
The remaining settings available in this section let you change the default campaign, program, and site that your linkcodes will be associated with by default. Use the drop-down menus to select your default campaign, program, and/or site for your linkcodes and click Save Changes.
Statistics Settings
Statistics Settings affect how affiliate statistics reports are displayed in NATS by default, along with what information is displayed by default. Click the "Modify" button in the top-right corner of the section to edit your default settings.
Use the drop-down menus here to choose the default breakdown that will be displayed when you go to the affiliate statistics pages, as well as the dates the displayed statistics will be grabbed from. The settings available here are:
- Default Breakdown - Sets the default affiliate statistics breakdown to be displayed when affiliates navigate to the main Statistics page (by clicking "Statistics" in the toolbar at the top of the page).
- Default Date Range - Sets the default Start and End date range to grab statistics for your reports from by default. You can choose from a wide variety of ranges, such as This Period, Today, This Week, Last Month, Past 90 Days, Last Year, and many more.
These settings will be put into action when an affiliate simply clicks the "Statistics" tab provided at the top of the page, as opposed to choosing a specific report. Once the affiliate clicks the "Statistics" tab, they will be taken to the Default Breakdown that they specified, for statistics recorded during the Default Date Range that was chosen by them.
Pick your desired Default Breakdown and Default Date Range from the provided drop-down menus in this section, then click “Save Changes” to save your custom settings.
Session Settings
Session settings let you choose to enable or disable various sticky options, which allow NATS to store certain settings or filters throughout the affiliate pages until the next time you log out of your account. Click the "Modify" button in the top-right corner of the section to edit your default Session Settings.
Use these settings to direct NATS to remember your affiliate preferences. Just fill in the provided checkboxes here, or leave them blank if you don't want that setting remembered. The options available on this page are:
- Remember Linkcode Campaign - Stores the last campaign that you set for your affiliate linkcodes. Setting this to "On" will make NATS automatically apply your last set campaign to any of linkcodes that you grab on any affiliate page.
- Remember Ad Tools Searches - Stores the last set of Adtool Search parameters that you used to find your adtools. Setting this to "On" will apply your most recent search parameters to any Affiliate Adtools page in NATS.
- Remember Stats Filters - Stores all of the statistic filters you have set on your affiliate statistics reports. When set to "On," NATS will automatically set your last remembered filters for every available statistics report.
These session settings can be useful if you want to keep the same statistics filters applied while searching through multiple affiliate statistics reports, for example.
NATS will remember the Session Settings that you set until the next time you log out of your affiliate account. Once you log out, your filters will be automatically reset to the default NATS settings. Click “Save Changes” once you're done setting your Session Settings.
