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Publisher Click References

What to use Click References for

By using click references it allows you to add a tracking reference to a link. Any clicks or transactions that occur through a link with a click reference can then be monitored through the various reports on the Awin platform. For example, if I created a link which had the click reference 'banner1' and then put this tracking link behind one of my banners, I could then review the specific performance of that banner.

There are lots of different ways that you'll be able to use click references:

• Some monitor specific pages of their websites
• Some monitor specific posts on their social channels
• Some monitor individual ad placements across their website

Ultimately, click references give you the ability to see where your Visitor has found the link to the Advertiser and therefore optimise the way you direct traffic to your site.

You also have the capability to use click references to tag Users to links (make sure not to send PII). This way you can see how your Users are performing and find out which individual User was responsible for an individual transaction (e.g. to award them).

Click references are publisher references for click links.
View references are publisher references for view URL.

How to use Publisher References

You can pass through six different publisher references in any one tracking URL.

Here is the mapping table for all publisher references :

To implement a publisher reference, simply add &pref1=YOURREF to your links (where YOURREF is replaced with whatever text you wish to have).

example with a click :

https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?s=2087&v=6683&q=301&r=111&pref1=page123&pref2=user123

example with a view :

https://www.awin1.com/cshow.php?s=2087&v=6683&q=301&r=111&pref1=page123&pref2=user123

Finding publisher references that you passed through in links

• You can find the individual values you passed in 'pref1' in the Transactions Report Interface.
• You can find the individual value of all the prefs you passed in the Transactions Report export.
• You can find the individual value of all the prefs you passed in V6 of the Publisher API
• You can find the individual value of all the prefs you passed in the Transaction Notification requests
• You can find aggregated statistics of prefs in the Click References Report

Please note:

• Please use all lower case for names of 'pref' parameters ("PREF" or "PRef" are not accepted)
• Publisher references do not have a character limit. However the aggregated Click References Report will only show you the first 50 characters.
• The 'pref1' value is visible to the Advertiser the transaction tracked for. The other publisher references are not.
• Awin supports the aggregation of up to 20000 unique clickref values per year. If this threshold is exceeded, aggregation is paused. In any case, the values are available in the transaction reports regardless of the number of unique values.
• For deeplink urls, you should add the prefs before the click-through URL (e.g. before the p= paramater)

example :

http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?mid=3&id=111&pref1=product123&pref2=page123&p=http://www.someproductpage.com

If your link management solution may require you to insert your click reference after the deep link click-through URL, you should add &clickref= at the end of the deep link. This only works with the standard clickref and not the additional clickrefs (e.g. clickref2) example :

http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?mid=3&id=111&p=http://www.someproductpage.com&clickref=product123

• prefs are restricted to latin1 alpha numeric values. These are the special characters you can use:

!$%()*,-./0123456789:;?@[]^_`{}~

• The following characters are not accepted:

# - because it used as an anchor for page links/blocks
& - because ampersand is for URL parameters
+ - Should not be used
| - gets converted into an underscore
' or " - will have a \ added before them