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Tracking & attribution

Referral links and campaign tracking

4 min readUpdated August 2026Applies to: Lite & Pro

https://yoursite.com/?ref=jane&campaign=spring

  • ref — the affiliate’s reference: a vanity slug or their numeric ID, either works. Rename the parameter under Settings → Tracking if ref collides with something else on your site.
  • campaign — optional, free text, recorded on the visit so the affiliate can tell which placement worked. utm_campaign is read as an alias for the same field, so a link an affiliate builds in a marketing tool with UTM tags already on it doesn’t need a second, parallel parameter added by hand.

Any URL on your site accepts the parameters, so an affiliate can link to the product page rather than the home page. Deep links convert better and cost you nothing to support — the tracker runs on init, before most page-specific logic, so it doesn’t care what page the parameter landed on.

A short link is free in this plugin, not a Pro upsell: any affiliate can request one from their portal, and a visit to https://yoursite.com/go/{slug} sets the same first-party cookie a query-string link does and then redirects — either to a page on your own site or to any other host, since a link shortener that can only point at itself isn’t much of one. Leave the slug blank and the plugin generates one automatically (/go/a7-k2m9); Pro’s contribution is letting an affiliate choose their own slug — on the free plugin, asking for /go/jane by name is refused outright rather than silently swapped for a random one, so nobody’s business card ends up printed with the wrong URL. See Creatives, short links and the leaderboard for the collision handling and the destination allow-list.

The /go/ prefix itself is filterable, so a site that already has a reason to use that path for something else can move the whole short-link feature elsewhere without breaking any link already printed — the rewrite rule is generated from the same setting the redirect handler reads, every request.

The default cookie window is 30 days, and it’s filterable per request — including per campaign, so a two-week seasonal push and an evergreen affiliate link don’t have to share one window. Longer favours the affiliate, shorter favours you, and the honest way to pick is to look at how long your buyers actually take to decide — a considered purchase with a 7-day window pays affiliates for almost nothing.

By default, attribution is first-touch: once a visitor’s cookie is set by one affiliate’s link, a second affiliate’s link does not take it over, so whoever got there first keeps the sale even if the visitor clicks several affiliate links before buying. A filter switches this to last-click, where the most recent link wins instead. Neither model is inherently correct — first-touch rewards discovery, last-click rewards closing — but whichever you pick, it applies uniformly and isn’t something that varies referral to referral.

If an affiliate would rather link to a clean URL with no ?ref= at all — a review site with hundreds of existing links being the obvious case — a registered referring domain can credit them purely from the HTTP referrer header, with nothing added to the link. That’s a separate feature with its own rules about what can and can’t be claimed; see Referring domains and off-site traffic.

What to tell an affiliate#

Their portal shows their link and copies it to the clipboard in one click. Send them there rather than composing links by hand: a mistyped slug or a misspelled ref value records a visit credited to nobody, and neither of you finds out until the month ends and a sale you both remember doesn’t show up anywhere.