Affiliate Campaigns
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.
NATS Campaigns allow affiliates to group and organize incoming traffic statistics, allowing for more specific tracking of promotions and programs. These campaigns, which are identified by separate traffic tags, create unique linkcodes, which allow you to separate and categorize statistics generated by surfers referred through that different campaigns and traffic tags.
This makes it possible to analyze web traffic that comes from different sources by uniquely tagging certain links and content. Affiliates can also use campaigns to prevent their statistics from getting cluttered and hard to analyze.
Creating a Campaign
Before you can sort your affiliate statistics by campaign, you must first create the appropriate traffic tags for your campaign. You can create a new campaign to categorize your referral statistics with on the affiliate "Campaigns" page, located under the "Ad Tools" pop-down menu at the top of the page.
You will see a section marked "Create New Campaign" on the next page, where you can create new traffic tags or add existing traffic tags in order to create a new affiliate campaign.
Enter a desired traffic tag for your new campaign in the "Campaign" field and click the plus (+) sign to the right. You can add as many traffic tags as you want to your new campaign here.
For example, you can create a campaign for image banner promotions with the banner, top, and blog to mark that your referrals are coming from an image banner located at the top of a blog you are using to promote your sites. Later, you can sort through your referrals to see how successful your banner promotions were, how successful your top promotions were, and how successful your blog promotions were.
Click "Apply Changes" once you have added your desired traffic tags, and your new campaign will be saved.
You can also do this through the Linkcodes page, which can be found under the "Ad Tools" pop-down menu at the top of the page. This involves the same process as creating campaigns on the "Campaigns" page; just follow the instructions provided above to create a new campaign.
Modifying Campaigns
NATS provides the ability to mix and match multiple traffic tags for your campaign(s). This allows referred member traffic to be categorized in multiple ways, allowing for flexibility in recording and reporting statistics. For example, you can take a preexisting campaign like the "banner, top, blog" campaign and add a new traffic tag, such as "free" in order to slightly modify it and create a new statistics report for that campaign. This will create a new campaign with the "banner, top, blog, free" tags, and leave your original campaign intact to keep recording referrals.
To do this, load the traffic tags from the campaign you want to modify. This can be done in multiple ways.
The first method allows you to manually adding the preexisting traffic tags you want to use by typing them into the "Campaign" field and clicking the plus (+) sign next to it. Partially filling in the name of an existing traffic tag here brings up a menu of all traffic tags that begin with the characters you input into the "Campaign" field. For example, typing the letter "f" into the field here will bring up all existing traffic tags that begin with that letter.
The second method allows you to add traffic tags from an already existing campaign by using the "Add Existing Campaign" link, found below the "Campaign" field on this page. Click the provided link to bring up an "Existing Campaigns" drop-down menu, where you can select any campaign you have already created. Choose the campaign you wish to add traffic tags from with the drop-down menu, then click "Add Campaign." You can add as many different traffic tags as you with to a campaign in NATS.
If you accidentally added a traffic tag you don't want to include in your campaign, you can remove them with a simple operation. Simply click the minus (-) sign next to the traffic tag you wish to remove from your campaign, and the tag will instantly be removed. You can also remove all of your set traffic tags with the "Clear All Traffic Tags" link below the "Campaign" field.
Once you have added all of your desired traffic tags to your new campaign, add a brief description for your new campaign with the "Description" field below the "Campaign" field. Once you have defined all of the available fields in this section, click "Save New Campaign" to create your new campaign.
Managing Your Campaigns
You can also manage all your currently existing campaigns on the NATS “Campaigns” page -- simply hover your mouse cursor over "My Accounts" in the top toolbar, and click "Campaigns."
The “Campaigns” table on this page contains essential information for your campaign and traffic tags, and also lets you perform various actions on them with the provided “Actions” links.
In this table, you will find the name, user-created notes/descriptions, and the creation date of each campaign in your NATS install. You can search for specific campaigns by using the search boxes at the top -- this feature allows you to search by either the name or description of a campaign. Just fill in the parameters you want to search your campaigns with, and click “Apply Search” to narrow down your displayed campaigns.
You can use the "Actions" links to perform actions on your campaigns or traffic tags as well. Click "Edit" to edit the description (notes) of a listed campaign. The "Hide" link hides all stats generated under that campaign from your statistics reports, which allows you to analyze how much of an impact that campaign is making on your overall statistics. Clicking "Stats" will bring up a statistics report for that campaign only, where you can view and analyze your campaign's performance separately from the rest of your affiliate statistics.
