Some affiliates send traffic from a site they own, where adding a tracking parameter to every link is impractical — a review site with three hundred existing links, for instance. A referring domain credits them on the HTTP referrer alone.
How it works#
Register a domain against an affiliate, and any visit arriving from it — with no ?ref= parameter at all — is attributed to them exactly as a referral link would be: the same first-party cookie is set, and the visit is logged the same way. It only fires when a visitor arrives with no existing referral cookie, so an explicit ?ref= link always takes priority, and a stray referrer header never overwrites an attribution a visitor actually earned by clicking a real link. A URL or a bare hostname both work when you register one; the plugin strips the scheme, credentials, port, path and any leading www. down to a bare, comparable domain, so https://WWW.Jane.example/blog?a=1 and jane.example register as the same claim.
Affiliates can ask, you decide#
An affiliate can request a domain from their portal. The request lands in your queue for a decision — it never takes effect on its own, because a domain that credits a commission is not something an affiliate should be able to grant themselves. If affiliates could claim domains directly, the first one to register google.com would be credited for every visitor arriving from search — the entire organic funnel, silently reassigned to one affiliate’s commission. That’s why claiming is capability-gated to admins even though requesting is open to any affiliate.
Two affiliates may request the same domain; the queue is ordered oldest-request-first specifically so you can see who asked before whom when you’re deciding between them, and the plugin will not quietly award it to whoever asked first on its own — a request sitting in the queue changes nothing until you decide it.
What can never be claimed#
A fixed block-list refuses the large search engines and social networks outright — Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, Ecosia, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, TikTok, X/Twitter, YouTube and t.co — whether an affiliate requests one or an admin tries to claim it directly. Crediting a partner for organic search or social traffic a merchant would have received anyway isn’t a referral, it’s a transfer away from the merchant, so these are refused at the code level rather than left to an admin to notice and reject by hand. The list is filterable per site if you need to adjust it. Your own site’s own domain is refused too, for a more obvious reason: crediting internal navigation would attribute every visitor who simply clicks through to a second page on your own site.
Subdomains and paths#
A registered domain matches its subdomains unless you say otherwise — claiming jane.example also covers blog.jane.example, so a blogger doesn’t have to register every subdomain of their own site individually. When more than one affiliate’s claim could match a referrer — a broad claim on jane.example and a more specific one on shop.jane.example from someone else — the longer, more specific match wins. Paths are not matched at all — if two affiliates share one domain and differ only by path (two writers on the same multi-author blog, say), referring domains is the wrong tool for telling them apart, and referral links are the right one.
Server-to-server postbacks#
Pro adds S2S postback attribution for the case where the conversion happens somewhere your site never sees — a phone order, a partner checkout, a contract signed off-platform.