Content and Blog Onboarding Guide for Commerce

Overview

Unlike other affiliate platforms, Sovrn Commerce requires all sites to implement or install our affiliate links and generate clicks before reviewing a site for approval. If approved, you'll be able to affiliate with tens of thousands of merchants without the need to apply to these merchants individually. To help get you through our review process, we've developed this onboarding guide, which will give you instructions, tips, warnings, and extra resources to give your account the best possible chance at approval.  

This onboarding guide is best suited for publishers who operate content sites or blogs, and are interested in using the Sovrn Commerce Javascript to automatically convert the links on their sites into affiliate links.

This guide will walk through the following steps (and you can skip to a specific step by clicking an icon below)

Registration  ➡️  Installation  ➡️  Generate Clicks  ➡️  Get Approved  ➡️  Next Steps

Registration

Sign up for a free account here. You can use an email and password, or choose to use your Google account to sign up. 

Find out more about terms and conditions/policies here and upon account creation.

You'll be asked to confirm your email address. Then, you'll be prompted to flow through the following steps: 

Welcome

Once you sign up, and confirm your email, you'll start on the Welcome tab in the Platform. From here, you can click Get started under Affiliate marketing or click Commerce on the left-side navigation bar. This'll take you to the Getting Started page for Commerce. 

You'll be able to return to the Welcome tab anytime to learn more and get started with other products. 

Getting Started

From here, click Get started with Commerce. This'll walk you through a few steps you'll need to complete to start monetizing, also described below: 

Submit Site for Approval

You'll be prompted to submit your site for approval. You will have the option come back later and submit more sites using the Settings page, which will appear soon. 

You'll also need to read and accept terms and conditions at this point. 

Install Commerce

Content and Blog sites usually benefit the most from using the Commerce JavaScript option presented here. It's a simple and effective way for you to affiliate all existing links to products and merchants on your website. However, you are also able to use the Create Link option, described in this article: Create Links in Commerce, or the Commerce API. 

Installing the JavaScript will automatically scan your page and change your existing links to products or merchants into affiliate links. The script loads asynchronously to your page, so it will not decrease the speed of your page load.

However, you will only see clicks, and any corresponding revenue, from links to merchants that you are approved for within Sovrn Commerce. 

You'll be able to find your site specific installation script and instructions Settings page when you click on the < > icon. 

You can also follow the steps below: 

1. Obtain your Sovrn Commerce API key. If you do not have your API key, you can ask the owner of your Sovrn Commerce account. The API key can be found on the Settings tab by clicking on the "Key" icon next to the site where you're installing Commerce.

2. Insert your API key into the script below, and copy this script. 

<script type="text/javascript">     
  var vglnk = {key: 'YOUR API KEY GOES HERE'};     
  (function(d, t) {         
  var s = d.createElement(t);             
  s.type = 'text/javascript';             
  s.async = true;             
  s.src = '//cdn.viglink.com/api/vglnk.js';         
  var r = d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0];             
  r.parentNode.insertBefore(s, r);     
  }(document, 'script')); 
</script>

3.   Paste the Commerce Code on your pages. This code should be inserted at the very end of your pages, just before the </body> tag.  

4. To check that the script was installed successfully you can use the following methods:

Inspect your webpage, and Navigate to the "Network" tab. Search for "sovrn" and reload your webpage. As long as you see sovrncm.js called to your page, the script is installed correctly. You can also use the "domains" response to see which domains our script is finding on the page.

Hover over a hyperlink on a page in which you installed the Sovrn script, and check that link address (appearing in the black bar in the bottom left of your browser) states:
https://redirect.viglink.com... instead of the intended product URL. This indicates that Sovrn Commerce is dressing this URL in our redirect. 

Right click on any hyperlink on the page and click on Copy Link Address, then paste this link into the address bar. It should read:
https://redirect.viglink.com

Generate Clicks

Once you've implemented Sovrn Commerce, we will need to see a few clicks routing through these links. This allows us to check on your installation and ensure that we are receiving traffic successfully. We recommend sending a few test clicks through these links, or having your users click on the links that you created. 
 

Get Approved

You've gotten through our implementation process! Now that you've generated a click, your site has been added to our team's list to review. We'll review this site as quickly as we can, but it may take 5 business days before you receive an email with your approval status.

If you have not received an update with your site's approval status, and you are not seeing clicks in your Sovrn dashboard after 5 business days, please reach out to support@sovrn.com.

Next Steps

If you've reached this point, congrats! You've successfully onboarded your first site onto Commerce. Here are some next steps to finish entering your account information, and to set you up for success moving forward. 

Affiliate with Merchants

If your site is approved for Sovrn Commerce, you can now affiliate with tens of thousands of our merchant partners without needing to request additional approval! You can search for any merchant that you would like to affiliate with in our "Approved Merchants" page to find their individual rate information, including average commission rates, conversions rates, average order values, and average earnings per click. Approved Merchants in Commerce.

You can also download a full list of merchants that your site is approved for via the "Approved Merchant Report" under the "Report" button in your analytics dashboard.

Looking for more information on how to best affiliate with merchants? We've included more tips here: 5 Tips for Getting Started with Sovrn Commerce

Changing your Sovrn Script Settings

Once installed, the script will work to affiliate links to products or merchants on your page. However, you can alter settings to customize your setup. You can find your settings by going to the Settings tab and selecting the gear icon next to the site where the script is installed. You'll see the following options as checkboxes that will be enabled when checked.  

• Override Affiliated Links - If you have existing affiliate links on your site, this setting will allow you to overwrite them. Please note that this feature only works on some affiliate links. To overwrite these links, make sure this box is checked. To make sure Sovrn Commerce bypasses these links, make sure this box is unchecked. Please note that the Sovrn javascript may still attempt to affiliate some already affiliated links on your page (see "Preventing the Sovrn Script from Affiliating Links" below).

• Link URLs - By default, Commerce Javascript will only automatically affiliate existing hyperlinks. If you also want to turn plain text URLs into affiliate links, check this box.

• Preventing the Sovrn Script from Affiliating Links - In some instances, you may not want the script to convert one of your links into a Sovrn Affiliate link. You can prevent a link from being converted by adding certain labels (called CSS "classes") to your site's HTML. You can add "norewrite" to ensure that links are never converted on specific parts of a page. Alternatively, if your link Optimization setting is enabled, you can use "nooptimize" to ensure that certain links are never optimized.

To prevent a single link from being monetized, the HTML would look like this: 

<a href="http://example.com" class="norewrite">Commerce ignores this</a>  

And the link would look like this:

Commerce ignores this

To prevent multiple links from being monetized, you would add the "norewrite" class to a parent HTML element.

The HTML would look like this:

<div class="norewrite"> 
  None of these links will be converted by Commerce.  
  <a href="https://www.sovrn.com/">Not this one</a>, or even <a href="https://www.sovrn.com/">this one</a>.  
</div>  
<a href="https://www.sovrn.com/" href="https://www.sovrn.com/">However, this one will be converted</a>

And the links would look like this:

None of these links will be converted by Commerce. Not this one, or even this one.

However, this one will be converted

Traffic Segmentation (adding additional sites to your account)

Sovrn requires each unique location where you intend to add Sovrn affiliate links to be reviewed for approval individually. Not only does Traffic Segmentation help with reporting for your account, but it keeps your account in compliance with Sovrn and our Merchant and Network partners.

To learn about traffic segmentation, please see this article: Traffic Segmentation in Commerce. 

You can add additional sites, profiles, or softwares to your account here. 

For example, someone with multiple social media accounts and a website, a Settings page with correctly segmented traffic would have separate sites submitted for: 

• instagram.com/page1

• instagram.com/page2

• website.com

For more information on how to use the Settings tab, please see: Settings in Commerce. 

Payment and Tax Information 

You'll want to finish setting up your account by adding payment and tax information. You can add your payment information here.

If you have multiple Apps in your Sovrn account, you will need to add payment information for each of your products. You can add payment information for a specific app by using the "Product" drop down menu. 

You can read more about Sovrn Commerce payment methods, thresholds, and schedules in this article: Payments in Commerce.

More Resources

Sovrn Blog

Find the Sovrn blog here. Successful affiliate marketing requires an active strategy, a good understanding of data, and, of course, high-quality content. Sovrn posts industry trends, recommended holiday promotions, and deep dives into our product offerings on the Sovrn Blog. Improving your understanding by learning more about these topics (to name a few) will help you in this area: 

• EPC

• How to write an excellent product review

• Secrets to Drive More Commerce Revenue (Webinar)

Knowledge Base

More information on how to use the Sovrn Commerce platform can be found in the Sovrn Knowledge base. You'll find information on everything from account setup, implementation, troubleshooting, analytics, and more. We recommend the checking out the following topics:

• Learn more about how to read the Commerce dashboard, understand the metrics, and some of the caveats you may run into, see: Analytics in Commerce.

• Find out about payment thresholds, cycles, methods, reconciliation, and more, see: Payments in Commerce. 

• Understand how to best utilize Commerce to affiliate with merchants, see: Approved Merchants in Commerce.

Support

As always, please feel free to reach out to publisher support with any questions, concerns, or feedback here. We're happy to help with any questions you have!