ShareASale offers a variety of solutions designed to track sales happening on your website. These tracking solutions are continuously updated and maintained to keep up with the constant evolution of consumer behavior alongside changes in the browser’s privacy policies. ShareASale merchants are recommended to upgrade to the latest tracking solution to ensure all valid referrals get tracked for publishers to earn commissions.
Please see the list of Integrations ShareASale offers below for popular e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Woocommerce, Wix, etc:
Tracking Solutions: https://help.shareasale.com/hc/en-us/sections/5306724438039-Tracking-How-to-Articles
Regardless of the tracking solution your team decides to proceed with, ShareASale's tracking consists of certain core elements which are described below:
1. The Awin Master Tag
This tag is a JavaScript library containing all functions required for our tracking solution and should unconditionally be appended to every page of the (merchant’s) site. This is used to identify and create First-Party Cookies.
The MasterTag allows our merchants to drop the cookie on the user’s device themselves, which helps to ensure cookies aren’t blocked by internet security software. This is particularly important as third-party cookies are much more likely to be blocked by browsers that are moving towards ITP compliant policies. The MasterTag is also required to implement some of our more advanced tracking solutions, such as Cookieless coupon tracking and Cross-Device Tracking.
2. ShareASale Conversion Tag
ShareASale’s tracking involves two 'tags' or 'pixels' which are snippets of code installed specifically on the checkout 'thank-you' receipt page and in the header of every other site page. The first tag (ShareASale Conversion Tag) is for tracking conversions such as sales and the second for assisting with Affiliate click attribution accuracy in certain browsers (Awin Master Tag), respectively.
Utilizing these two pieces of code captures the information about the customer's sale, allowing the transaction details to be reviewed on your ShareASale account. When the tracking solution has been tested and confirmed to be fully functioning, additional commission rules can be set up through the ShareASale account portal to determine how commissions are set to be paid out.
ShareASale tracking retrieves the following data about Affiliate-referred orders where possible. If desired, a merchant is also able to add additional parameters to track further information about their transactions. A few of these parameters have been listed below:
1. Amount – order subtotal after discounts but before taxes and shipping
2. Tracking – order ID of the customer
3. Coupon Code – the discount code used in the order, if any
4. Skulist – a comma-separated list of SKUs for the products purchased
5. Pricelist – a comma-separated list of item prices for the SKUs in the same order
6. Quantitylist – a comma-separated list of the quantities of each SKU
7. Newcustomer – whether the customer was new (1), old (0), or unknown (no value)
8. Currency – the three letter ISO-4217 currency code for the currency used by the customer, e.g. EUR for Euros, GBP for British Pounds, USD for US Dollars, etc.
3. Server-to-Server (S2S) Tracking
ShareASale also offers an alternative method of tracking conversions via the API. Through the ShareASale Merchant API, an API request can be made from the merchant's servers to directly communicate with ShareASale’s servers to forward conversion data.
In the case of S2S, tracking is fully independent of browsers – therefore the ability of adblocking software stopping ShareASale tracking conversions is avoided. This contrasts with the traditional tracking methods that are triggered in a user’s browser and can be subject to being blocked by ITP and other ad blocking means.
To access ShareASale's API documentation, please login to your account and click the link below:
https://account.shareasale.com/m-apiips.cfm
Here you will find your API token, secret, and the security hash documentation. You can also set up IP protections if you so choose, though this is not required and the API is currently to accept calls from any IP. Read the API DOCUMENTATION in order to set up the security hash.
If your team would like to proceed with Server-to-Server tracking, please have your developer team reach out to ShareASale’s Integrations and Technical support team to request for the additional instructions for this procedure.
The majority of ShareASale’s out of the box Integrations and Tracking Solutions can be set up successfully by following their respective documentation. In the case that your team is running into issues and errors during the set-up phase, please contact our support team at ShareASale@ShareASale.com.