Navigating your affiliate network: ShareASale

Program Description

  1. Login to your SAS account

  2. From the navigation menu at the top of the screen, click My Account > Affiliate Communications

  3. This will bring you to your Program Bio - make any relevant adjustments to your bio here and click Update to save your changes

    1. Here’s where you want to showcase what your brand and program is all about, give a description of your company, highlight your commission rate and average order value, and specify your cookie duration here as well.

Keywords

  1. From the navigation menu at the top of the screen, click My Account > Affiliate Communications

  2. Under Affiliate Communications click on Keywords

  3. Keywords within your affiliate network are the search terms you want to appear under when an affiliate is searching for new brands to partner with, focus on highlighting your products and unique elements to your brand

    1. For example, a company that sells coffee might include ‘Fair trade coffee beans’ as one of their keywords

  4. Make any relevant adjustments to your keywords and click Update to save your changes, note that SAS has a character limit of 255 for this section

Coupon links

*Note: Coupon links do not need to be actual “coupons” ; they can be evergreen offers like “Free shipping on orders over $50” or “10% off your first order”. You can even set up coupons links to highlight your best sellers!

  1. From the navigation menu at the top of the screen, click Creatives > Coupon Database

  2. Select Add Coupon

  3. In the Title field, give your coupon a name for example, “Save 10% when you sign up with email”

  4. Only fill out the Coupon Code field if you’re providing a specific coupon code for the promotion ex. SAVE10

  5. Paste the Title for the coupon in the HTML and Description fields

  6. Category, Restrictions, Keywords, Special Commission & Require Coupon Use for Special Commissions are optional fields and only need to be filled out if they’re relevant to the specific deal you’re creating

  7. If the promotion has an expiration date, set the End Date to the day AFTER it expires since ShareASale will deactivate the coupon at midnight on the expiration date. If it doesn’t expire, type NEVER in the field.

  8. Upload the relevant image for the product you’re referring to and save your new coupon

Text Links

*A good rule of thumb is to have a text link for each of the following (or more): your homepage, shop all, best sellers, and links to any coupons you’ve set up

  1. From the navigation menu at the top of the screen, click Creatives > Text Links

  2. Select Add Coupon

  3. The Creative Name and Enter Link Text Here fields can be the same, if you are linking the text link to a coupon you can use the coupon title here

  4. Attach the URL for the relevant page on your website

  5. If you already have your coupons set up, there will be a checkbox at the bottom that says Coupon, click this and select the corresponding coupon

  6. Make sure the link is set to Active and click Add Now to save your new text link

Banners/Images

*Make sure banners include branding elements and a call to action. Keep in mind affiliates use these images as their promotional materials without modification so they must be effective ads in and of themselves, not requiring additional design elements or text by the affiliate.

See examples of well-crafted banners here: https://instapage.com/blog/banner-ads/

  1. From the navigation menu at the top of the screen, click Creatives > Banners

  2. Drag and drop the image(s) you want to upload

  3. By default SAS will have the image link to your homepage

  4. To have an image link to a specific page either add the image individually and save it with the corresponding URL

    1. Alternatively if you uploaded your images in bulk, you can click on the image you want to update the URL for, add the new URL and save the changes

Product Feed

*A product feed is a CSV file of your inventory that gets uploaded to your network so affiliates can have a live view of what’s in stock and what they can promote

  1. SAS requires the following as columns in your CSV

    1. SKU - this must be a unique identifier, rows with identical SKUs will be removed

    2. URL

    3. Price

    4. Category - based on SAS’s corresponding category numbers

    5. Subcategory - based on SAS’s corresponding subcategory numbers

    6. MerchantID

  2. Some additional fields to include would be

    1. Name

    2. URL to image/banner (in SAS)

    3. URL to thumbnail image (in SAS)

    4. Description

    5. Search terms

    6. Status (in stock/out of stock)

    7. Manufacturer

    8. Merchant Category

    9. Bestseller (yes/no)

  3. See an example of a detailed product feed here

  4. Enter the relevant info for each of your products

  5. Save your CSV as a .zip or .gz

  6. Login to your SAS account

  7. From the navigation menu at the top of the screen, click Creatives > Datafeed

  8. Select “Upload a New Datafeed”

  9. Your product feed will be sent to SAS for review before being uploaded to your profile

For additional support regarding creating a product feed in SAS please read this article

Adjusting Commission Rates

  1. Click on Affiliates > Affiliate List

  2. From the Affiliate List, search for the affiliate whose commission rate you want to adjust

  3. Click on the affiliate’s name to open their Affiliate Info page

  4. From the Affiliate Info page, click on ‘edit’ next to the default commission rate in the box on the right hand side of the screen

  5. Adjust the per sale commission rate to your desired individual rate

  6. Be sure to save your changes before refreshing or leaving the page

Additional Resources

ShareASale Blog: https://blog.shareasale.com/ 

  • Check out this video at the following timestamps that walks through these steps:

    • 23:20 - Banners

    • 24:15 - Text links

    • 25:08 - Coupons 

If you have any ShareASale specific questions, please reach out to their support team directly at shareasale@shareasale.com