WordPress – Send Affiliate ID to ActiveCampaign upon Registration

Assignment

The Expand Online Summit (and others) use ThriveCart for checkout and affiliate management. Due to the nature of the summit event, we wanted to also capture the affiliate on lead registration, not just on purchase. This also has a bonus advantage that if signup occurs on a different device than purchase, the affiliate will be able to be manually reconciled.

Solution

I used jquery to create a cookie, local to the visitor which houses the affiliate ID.

I used a Gravity Forms form to collect registrant data and loaded the affiliate ID in a hidden field on the form thereby tying the registration to the affiliate. I connected Gravity Forms to ActiveCampaign (in this case) and stored the affiliate ID in a custom field.

The first step to this solution was to add jquery.cookie.js to my WordPress theme files. I am using a child theme of Astra and inserted the jquery file into my theme via Cpanel / File Manager. (not shown in this post)

The current version of the code can be found on GitHub here –> https://github.com/js-cookie/js-cookie. The version I used in this project was is slightly older, as the first time I used this code was in 2017. The most recent summit I used this code for was the Expand Online Summit which I hosted in 2020, 2021 and 2022. That is the site where the screenshots and excerpts are pulled from.

I inserted this code onto my homepage to pull the affiliate ID from the url (param = affiliate) and store it in the cookie called first-aff. For this summit, I used first affiliate, so I also checked to make sure that we didn’t already have an affiliate stored before storing the new affiliate in the cookie.

jQuery( document ).ready(function() {
var getUrlParameter = function getUrlParameter(sParam) {
var sPageURL = decodeURIComponent(window.location.search.substring(1)),
sURLVariables = sPageURL.split('&'),
sParameterName,
i;
for (i = 0; i < sURLVariables.length; i++) {
sParameterName = sURLVariables[i].split('=');
if (sParameterName[0] === sParam) {
return sParameterName[1] === undefined ? true : sParameterName[1];
}
}
};
$cur_affiliate = getUrlParameter('affiliate');
$savedRef = jQuery.cookie('first-aff');
if ($savedRef) {
    if ($cur_affiliate) {
        if ($savedRef === 'no-affiliate')
            jQuery.cookie('first-aff', $cur_affiliate, { expires: 30, path: '/' });
    }
} else {
    if ($cur_affiliate) {
        jQuery.cookie('first-aff', $cur_affiliate, { expires: 30, path: '/' });
    } else {
        jQuery.cookie('first-aff', 'no-affiliate', { expires: 1, path: '/' });
    }
}
});

Next, I created the Gravity Forms form

The Credited Affiliate field is a Hidedn field that is populated by the variable aff_id. So how do I get the affiliate information into the aff_id? I use a filter action in my theme’s function.php

// This filter pulls the affiliate id from the cookie and populates it on the registration form
// This assures us that we are tracking first click

add_filter( 'gform_field_value_aff_id', 'aff_id_dynamic_population' );

function aff_id_dynamic_population( $value ) {
	$cookie_name = 'first-aff';
	
	if(!isset($_COOKIE[$cookie_name])) {
    	return '0';
	} else {
    	return $_COOKIE[$cookie_name];
	}
}

To alter any gravity forms field data programmatically, you add a filter that starts with gform_field_value_ followed by your parameter name. This filter is super siple, if the cookie is not present, we load a value of 0 otherwise we load the affiliate ID value. I could have not returned a value, but decided that I wanted definitive proof that no cookie was stored.

Now, I was also insanely curious how many “last cookie” were different than “first cookie”, so I also loaded the affiliate directly from the url, if present into a second hidden field. This was mostly for research purposes 🙂

Next, I connected the form to ActiveCampaign, using the Gravity Forms ActiveCampaign Add-On. I set my custom fields (for the affiliate ids) in ActiveCampaign before I connected Gravity Forms to Active Campaign.

This small snippet of code allowed me to attribute sales to my affiliates even if a purchaser used multiple devices to engage with the virtual summit.

Are you interested in this type of code for your WordPress website?

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