Social Media Onboarding Guide for Commerce

Overview

Unlike other affiliate platforms, Sovrn Commerce requires all campaigns to implement or install our affiliate links and generate clicks before reviewing a campaign 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 want to add affiliate links to their Social Media profiles. Each and every social media profile you'd like to use to generate earnings will need to be submitted.

Sovrn Commerce can currently work with the following platforms:

• Facebook 

• Instagram

• Youtube

• TikTok

• Twitter

• Discord

• Pinterest

• Snapchat

This guide will walk through the following steps (and you can skip to a specific step below):

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

Registration

Sign up for a free account here using your email and password, or choose to sign up via a Google Account. You can review our terms, conditions, and policies upon account creation, and they can also be found here.

After signing up, you’ll need to confirm your email address. Once confirmed, you’ll be guided through the following steps:

All Products

You'll start here on the All Products tab in the Platform. From here, you can click Get started under Commerce box on the right, or click Commerce on the left-side navigation bar. Either method will take you to the Getting Started page for Commerce.

You'll be able to return to the All Products tab anytime to learn more and implement other products. 

Getting Started

From here, click on the blue Apply Now on the Affiliate marketing made easy page. This will walk you through a few steps you'll need to complete to start monetizing, which are described below: 

Submit Site for Approval

You'll be prompted to submit a site (or “campaign”) for approval. You will have the option to come back later and submit more campaigns using the Settings page, which will be accessible in the Platform after you have at least one approved campaign.

You'll also need to read and accept Terms and Conditions at this point.

Installation

You're making great progress! Next, you'll need to add Sovrn's affiliate links to your site.

Create Links is the best way to install Commerce for social media. With this feature, you'll be able to create an affiliate link that can be installed anywhere: social media sites, websites, blogs, and more.

To create an affiliate link, we recommend the following steps:

1. Use the Merchants tab to find a merchant you'd like to work with. Then navigate to the merchant's site and find the URL of a product that you would like to affiliate. 

2. Navigate to the Create Links tab and click the +Create button in the top right corner. Fill in each field, including the campaign where you will post this affiliate link, the URL you are hoping to affiliate, and a name for this link. 

3. Click Create. This will generate a shortened sovrn.co affiliate link. You can see this link in your Create Links tab and copy it to your clipboard using the Copy Link button. 

4. Paste this affiliate link on your social media page or profile.

You can also create individual affiliate links through the Sovrn Chrome Extension.

1. Install the extension and follow the instructions here to log in and switch between your different sites in order to create affiliate links for them.

2. After installation, you can click on the Sovrn extension when viewing a product or merchant's page! Clicking on the extension will return an affiliate link (if Sovrn works with this merchant), which can be copied and pasted into your content.

Clicking the extension will also display your estimated earnings per click and any other retailers that may supply the same product.

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 made it through our implementation process! Now that you've generated a click, your campaign has been added to our team's list to review. We'll review this campaign 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 campaign'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

Congratulations! 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 campaign 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 on our Merchants page to find their individual rate information, including average commission rates, conversions rates, average order values, and average earnings per click. Learn more about affiliating with merchants here: Merchants in Commerce.

You can also download a full list of merchants that your campaign is approved for with the "chant Report" that is available from your analytics dashboard and clicking on the blue Report button on the top right corner.

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.

Add additional sites to your account: Traffic Segmentation

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 from the Settings page. For example, someone with multiple social media accounts and a website would have segmented their traffic out properly if they submitted their campaigns individually for review like so:

• instagram.com/accountname

• facebook.com/accountname

• examplewebsite.com

For more information on how to use the Settings tab, please see: Site 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 are utilizing multiple Sovrn products under one account, you will need to add payment information for each of your products. You can add payment information for a specific product 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

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:

• What is EPC?

• How to write a product review: a guide for affiliate marketers

• 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: Merchants in Commerce.

Support

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