Using the popular AffiliateWP plugin to create an affiliate program for your WordPress site?
If you are, it’s important to create the best experience possible for your affiliates and encourage them to engage with your affiliate program. After all, these are the people who are promoting your offer and driving traffic to your website.
Performance Reports for AffiliateWP is a third-party AffiliateWP add-on from KryptoniteWP that helps you do that by letting you send detailed (and customizable) performance reports to your affiliates via email.
You can use these performance reports to motivate your affiliates to promote your program, just generally keep them informed of how they’re doing, share upcoming deals/promotions, and more.
In our hands-on Performance Reports for AffiliateWP review, we’ll share more about how the plugin works and show you what it’s like to actually use it on an AffiliateWP store.
Performance Reports for AffiliateWP Review: What the Plugin Does
Performance Reports for AffiliateWP does exactly what the name suggests – it lets you send performance reports to some or all of your affiliates.
You can fully customize the content of these reports. But in general, they can include information such as each affiliate’s visits, referrals, paid earnings, unpaid earnings, and pending earnings.
You’re also able to specify a start and end date for the performance report and include those details in the email. For example, you could pull numbers from the past month, past week, past year, and so on.
To fully customize the content of the email, you can use the Classic TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor (what WordPress used to use for blog posts before changing to the block editor), along with template tags to dynamically insert the information for each affiliate.
When you send an email, you can either send the report to all affiliates or you can use filters to only send the email to certain affiliates.
First, you can target a specific affiliate by name, which lets you send a performance report to a single user.
Second, you can specify a minimum number of visits and referrals, along with the start and end date for the period in question.
For example, you could only send the performance report to people who have generated at least one referral in the last month.
Affiliates also have an option to subscribe/unsubscribe from receiving performance reports, both via their frontend dashboards and the emails themselves.
The plugin comes from KryptoniteWP, a development shop that offers a number of plugins, including some other AffiliateWP add-ons. However, the team behind KryptoniteWP is probably better known for its other brands – the Amazon Affiliate for WordPress (AAWP) plugin and MH Themes.
Use Cases for Performance Reports for AffiliateWP
So – what can you actually use these performance reports for? Here are a few examples:
- Keep your affiliates up to date on how they’re performing. For example, you could send a monthly performance report.
- Motivate them to promote your affiliate program even more, either by showing them how much they’re already earning or highlighting that their earnings are lower than they could be.
- Showcase how they performed during a specific promotion/sale. This could also serve to motivate them to promote your program more aggressively during future promotions.
This is by no means a complete list and you certainly might have your own unique use cases – I’m just sharing a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing.
How to Use Performance Reports for AffiliateWP
Now that you know what Performance Reports for AffiliateWP does, let’s take a detailed look at what it’s like to actually configure and use Performance Reports for AffiliateWP.
To use the plugin, you’ll obviously need to already have the actual AffiliateWP plugin installed and activated on your site.
From there, it’s very easy to use the Performance Reports for AffiliateWP plugin.
Here’s how it works…
1. Choose Subscribe Behavior
Once you’ve installed and activated the Performance Reports for AffiliateWP plugin alongside AffiliateWP, your first step is to configure the email that you send to your affiliates.
To do this, you can head to AffiliateWP → Settings → Performance Reports.
At the top, you can configure the behavior for subscribing/unsubscribing.
You can either send reports to all affiliates or require affiliates to register to receive reports (explicit opt-in).
You can also choose whether or not to let affiliates unsubscribe from receiving performance reports. If enabled, there will be a link in the email that lets them unsubscribe, along with an option in the affiliate settings area of their dashboard.
If you enable the options for affiliates to choose whether or not to receive reports, they’ll get an opt-in checkbox in the Settings tab of the frontend affiliate dashboard.
Here’s an example of what it looks like on my demo site:
As an admin, you can also manually enroll affiliates in reports from the WordPress dashboard. Go to the Affiliates area and then click on the affiliate’s account.
If you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see a Performance Reports section that includes a checkbox where you can select whether to opt-in or opt-out for that affiliate:
2. Customize Email Content
Below the options for opt-in/unsubscribe, you can set up the default email subject line and email content for your reports.
This helps you save time when sending your emails, but you’re still able to customize the content for individual performance reports. More on that later.
For example, you could set up the default template here but write a custom introduction for each email that you send.
The important thing to note here is that you’re able to use all of those template tags at the bottom to dynamically insert the information for each affiliate.
3. Start Sending Performance Reports
Now, you’re ready to start sending performance reports to your affiliates.
To do that, go to AffiliateWP → Reports → Performance Reports.
On the first screen, you can make two choices:
- Who to send reports to – you can leave the fields blank to send to all affiliates. Or, you can target a specific affiliate by name or specify only affiliates with a certain minimum number of visits or referrals.
- Time period – you can enter the start and end date for this performance report.
One thing that I think could be useful is the ability to also specify a maximum number of visits or referrals in addition to a minimum. This would make it easier to target both high-performing and low-performing affiliates.
For example, adding this feature would let you send a special email to affiliates who generated between 1-5 referrals and then a different email to people who generated 5+ referrals.
Once you’re happy with your settings, you can click the Preview Performance Reports button to advance.
At the top of the next screen, you’ll see two things:
- A summary of your report conditions.
- An option to customize the email subject and text for this specific report. It will pre-fill with the default content that you set up in the previous section, but you’re free to edit everything.
One thing that I noticed here is that this version of the email editor seems to only include the Text tab view (which shows the HTML code). It doesn’t give you the Visual WYSIWYG view option like you had when setting up the default content.
I’m not quite sure why that is, but it’s still easy enough to add/tweak content if needed.
Further down the page, you’ll see a list of the actual affiliates that this performance report will send to. That is, all of the affiliates that meet the conditions that you set.
For example, if you set the minimum number of referrals to one, this list would show all of the affiliates that had at least one referral in your chosen time period.
If everything looks good, you can send your performance report by clicking the Send Performance Reports button:
4. View Past Performance Reports for Individual Affiliates
If needed, the plugin lets you check the history of performance reports sent to individual affiliates.
To access this, go to AffiliateWP → Affiliates and click on the account name of the affiliate that you want to check.
Then, scroll down to the Performance Reports section and click the link next to History:
You’ll then see a list of all the performance reports sent to that affiliate, along with an option to preview the actual content of the email sent to that affiliate:
And that’s pretty much it for what it’s like to use Performance Reports for AffiliateWP!
Performance Reports for AffiliateWP Pricing
Performance Reports for AffiliateWP is a premium plugin.
There are currently three different pricing plans. All of the plans offer full features, the only difference is the number of sites upon which you can activate the plugin:
- 1 site – €39
- 3 sites – €89
- 10 sites – €179
All plans come with one year of support and updates. If you want to continue receiving support and updates after the first year, you’ll need to renew your license.
By default, licenses will renew automatically, but you can easily turn this off from your account area after making your purchase.
Alternatively, you can also access the plugin as part of the developer’s AffiliateWP add-ons bundle, which adds in the developer’s other AffiliateWP-focused plugins including tools for payout statements and more advanced payouts.
These bundles start at €99 for use on a single site.
Final Thoughts on Performance Reports for AffiliateWP
Overall, Performance Reports for AffiliateWP delivers on its promise of helping you send performance reports to your affiliates.
The plugin is quite simple in terms of the number of options it adds, but it gives you everything you need if you want to send performance reports to your affiliates.
You can use these reports to motivate your affiliates, provide them with customized tips, and just generally keep them up to date with how they’re doing.
It’s also nice that affiliates can control whether to receive reports from their frontend dashboards.
If you want to get started, you can use the button below to purchase Performance Reports for AffiliateWP.
