Lifehack: calculating commission payments

Published 04.09.2021 17:00 in Cases

In the free AlterCPA Moe, the work with commissions was impudently cut out. But with the help of this trick, it can be returned to almost its original form. You just need to sacrifice the net profit statistics.

What’s the point?

The functionality of the free CRM from AlterCPA has been severely curtailed so that users suffer and buy the full version. Therefore, you can’t simply work with affiliates and count commissions for leads in it. But we have a mechanism for calculating the net costs of orders. You can use it to calculate the commissions.

The algorithm is simple:

• We set commissions in the service cost settings
• We do not set any other cost of goods and delivery
• In the column “Expense” of statistics by sources, we get the amount of commissions

With this approach, we lose the ability to calculate the cost of goods and logistics costs. But with the completely free option for calculating commissions, the loss is not critical.

Setting up commissions

We go to the price settings of the selected offer and look at the cost of the service. In this field, we set the commission to the affiliate for the accepted order. It should be set in the main currency of the country, the currency code is indicated on the right. If you work with several countries, recalculate the commissions at the exchange rate for convenience.

Very important! In the fields of the cost of delivery and goods, as well as in the price of goods in stock, there must be zeros, otherwise the commissions will be calculated incorrectly.

Although, here a trick is possible too. You can create some special products that will have the checkboxes “Single” and “Do not count in quantity”, as well as a certain cost price. And with the help of these products you can reward webmasters for any special achievements. Or set small cost prices for the goods themselves and thereby organize additional payments for upsales and cross-sales.

Analysing commissions

We make payments to affiliates from time to time and count them through the “Source Analysis” subsection of the “Traffic” section. We go into the statistics, select the period and look at the “Expense” column – this is the required amount of commission.

What’s nice: this report is visible to the publishers themselves. They can measure the profitability of their ad campaigns, albeit manually. Let me remind you that each report can be downloaded in Excel and any missing values can be calculated using the simplest formulas.

Alternative option

All of us in school were taught to use Excel. And every report in AlterCPA Moe has the ability to export to Excel.

Do you want to implement a commission scheme “Percentage of the lead” on all affiliates? Go to the “Analysis by source” in the “Traffic” section, select the desired period and currency and download the file. In the cell R3C17 and below in the text, put the percentage of the affiliate. In cell R3C18 put the formula =RC[-1]*RC[-8]/100. Stretch the formula by the scruff from the lower right corner.

Do you want to use a percent commission of the completed order? Go to the delivery analytics, generate and download the report for the required period. In column 18, in front of the affiliates, enter their percentage. In column 19, insert the formula =RC[-1]*RC[-3]/100.

Do you want a flat commission for a completed order? Similarly, download the delivery report, in the 18th column indicate the commission amount, and in the 19th column insert the formula =RC[-1]*RC[-12].

The best thing, of course, would be to buy a full-featured AlterCPA Pro, but we are not looking for easy ways.