We've been super busy over the last few weeks on FirstPromoter. We're happy to share that the big majority of our users have already migrated to version 2 of FirstPromoter and the positive feedback we got is overwhelming. If you haven't migrated yet please contact us on live-chat, we'll close version 1 very soon.

Lots of new features have been added to FirstPromoter v2 in the last few weeks. Here are some of them:

View email events and the option to resend emailsnew 

Now you can see which emails have been sent and which failed, together with their error message. Moreover, you can also resend the emails.

Payout method bank regions and crypto currency types new 

You're able to select what regions you want to allow for bank payout method. For ex. if you want to pay only to US bank accounts, you can select only US banks. For crypto, you can choose which currencies are available for payout. These options can be set from Payouts > Available payout methods.

Custom panel on affiliate dashboard new 

We added a new panel on the affiliate dashboard where you can put any content you like there, including images and videos. Many customers are using it to share more details about the program, onboarding steps, welcome messages, emphasizing important parts of the affiliate terms, etc.

Reorder affiliate signup fields and affiliate dashboard panels new 

The order of the fields and sections can be changed easily by just dragging and dropping to desired location.

Adjusting items shown per page new 

Before this feature, you could only see 10 items per page on admin tables. Now you have the option to change it to 20 or 50 items. 

Font selection for the affiliate dashboard new 

On the Layout section of the affiliate dashboard configuration you'll find a new Font selectbox which allows you to select any Google font and apply it to your affiliate dashboard.

Viewing agreements on the affiliate dashboard

Affiliates have the option to review what agreements they agreed on, the date of the agreement and their content. The option is found on Profile settings > View agreements.

Features ported from version 1 improvement 

• Custom email template. You can use your own email template to render the emails instead of ours. It supports any valid HTML
• Minimum paying customers required for payout. Our users can set a number of minimum paying customers required for affiliates to have in order to get paid. This is a powerful anti-fraud measure.

30+ bug fixes fix 

Since version 2 has a completely new UI, we paid a lot of attention on ensuring platform stability and our team did a great job fixing the bugs we encountered in record time.

Since the successful launch of FirstPromoter version 2, our team kept working on making FirstPromoter even better. We have some new features and improvements to share with you:

Monthly and Weekly recurring emails new 

You can now send monthly or weekly emails to your promoters. It's very useful to keep them engaged and remind them about their performance. We can set emails to repeat on a specific day of the week/month at a specific hour.

Thanks to our templating engine, you can craft personalized emails based on their performance like:

• earnings amount from the last month
• customers referred in the last 30 days
• referrals sent in the last 7 days, etc

We also prepared a Monthly Overview template for you. Feel free to edit it and enable it if you like. You can find it in your emails section called "Your Monthly Performance Update"

Customize rewards per promoter improvement 

We finished migrating the feature to customize rewards for individual promoters. It's easier, faster and more intuitive to personalize rewards for specific promoters.  Check our help article to see it in action.

Detailed reports inside promoter pages new 

Promoter pages on the admin side have a new tab called "Reports". You can see there more reports related to the promoter, including the new ones for traffic sources and landing pages.

Embedded portal issue is fixed fix

FirstPromoter version 2 portal can now be embedded inside your applications. If you are migrating from v1, there's no change to do on your end, you just need to contact us.

Besides these changes, we also did many small bug fixes and small improvements to the UI and UX in the last month.

We are excited to announce the launch of FirstPromoter 2.0! This major release comes with a revamped UI and UX, making FirstPromoter look beautiful, fresh and easier to use. Besides the UI refresh, we've added 30+ new features and improvements to make your experience even better. 

What's new in FirstPromoter 2.0

The biggest change on FirstPromoter version 2 is the new clean and modern UI. We've rebuilt the UX for many flows, like new campaign and payouts, making it more intuitive and less confusing.

FirstPromoter also runs much smoother and it's faster, improving loading speed by even 10x in some places.

New Affiliate Dashboard

• Option to add your own custom fields on the affiliate signup page. There are 4 types of fields you can add: single-line input, multi-line input, single choice and multiple choice.
• Option to specify which fields are mandatory and optional on the signup form.
• Revamped dashboard with many more customization options.
• New reporting section for affiliates.
• View data globally across all campaigns.

New Campaign Features:

• Introduced an easier way of setting up complex rewards (check edit campaign).
• Rewards can be easily set for monthly, annual, or one-time charges without requiring plan or price ids.
• New target reward based on revenue.
• Level up to another campaign when revenue target is reached, not just customers count.

New Reports:

• Added "Traffic sources"
• Added "Landing page" reports.

Fraud detection:

• We're now able to detect traffic coming from ads. You can block it completely or keep commissions generated from that as pending for review (default).

Better account security:

• You can now enable two factor authentication for admins' log in.
• Both admins and affiliates can now sign up and log in using their Google account.
• You can enable email confirmation for promoter accounts.

Batch Actions:

• All major sections support batch processing like deny, move, delete etc.

Enhanced Filtering:

• Major sections support advanced chained filtering by various fields, including custom fields.

New Email Features:

• Added Broadcast emails - send direct emails to campaigns or a selection of promoters.
• New email editor.
• Set your own sending email domain using DNS not just SMTP. You can choose between the two.
• Added "Inactivity Trigger": Sends emails when a promoter doesn’t gain new clicks or referrals over a set period.
• Added "Target Trigger": Notifies via email once a specific number of clicks or referrals are reached.
• The same email can be set for multiple campaigns.

Improved Assets Section:

• Assets now include categories.
• Introduced additional asset types: documents and text content.

Revamped Payouts System:

• Payouts are much more intuitive. They are now separated into 3 categories: next (payouts due soon), overdue (missed payouts), and paid payouts.
• Payouts are generated as "Pending" regardless of payout method availability or if the minimum amount isn't achieved. The conditions for payout are applied at payment time. Besides giving more flexibility, this new approach also solves the issues of missing payouts or the need of generating them manually.
• Payout methods and terms are now globally set instead of being campaign-specific.

Others

• Easier to follow onboarding and integration flow.
• Automatically import events from Stripe when adding manually a new referral.
• Promoters are archived as a primary action rather than direct deletion.
• New charts on dashboard and promoter pages.
• Customers and Leads sections are unified into Referrals section.
• Commissions can accept private or public notes (visible to promoters).
• Promotions section was removed. They will appear inside Promoters.

Switching to version 2

New accounts use version 2 by default, old accounts can access a preview version first by clicking the "FirstPromoter Version 2 is available" button from top right. When they are ready to fully switch, they should contact us. 

Tracking, API and integrations are not affected by the new release. Note that some accounts may not be switched right away, depending on the size or features they use. 

new We just released a much requested feature by many of our customers regarding fraud detection.

Refund and chargeback fraud happens when affiliates sign up fake customers with stolen or virtual cards, wait for you to pay them then the bank or themselves ask for a refund, remaining with the paid commissions.

This new feature helps detecting much easier this type of fraud by showing you the affiliates that have a high refund rate. The refund rate threshold is set at a conservative default of 25%, calculated by the number of refunded customers and total customers. This will spot affiliates that have at least 1 refunded customer for every 4 customers they referred.

You should adjust the threshold based on your own billing behavior. For ex. if you're doing initial charges to validate a credit card, FirstPromoter will track the refunds that happens in the process so your perceived refund rate will be higher.

Suspicious affiliates will appear on Promoters section on Suspicious tab. The data is refreshed every 20 minutes so the first time you enable it please wait 20 minutes to fill up.

Note that if an affiliate is suspicious, doesn't necessary mean they're a fraudster, you still need to verify their account first and check what referrals they made.

By the way, if you're wondering why our updates pace is a bit slow, that's because we're focusing a big part of our resources on the new UI of FirstPromoter which will be finished very soon.

fix VAT validation for UK companies it's now fixed.

fix Companies that have a large number of promoters won't get an error when trying to export the promoters. The export will be processed in the background and when it's finished, they will get an email with a temporary download link.

fix the cache of the email counter caused some issues for some new accounts, showing a wrong count in the "Sent" column. We identified the problem and fixed it.

new Last week we launched a wizard that helps new users integrate FirstPromoter much easier with their websites. It has a simple step by step approach with new pre-made scripts and more examples for custom integrations that require a developer. 

Only users that signed up for a trial after 31st March 2021 have access to it. If you're an older user and want to try it out, please contact us.

new It's now possible to use Stripe's customer facing promotion codes for affiliate tracking. Until last week, you could only use the Stripe Coupon Code ID for tracking, which is different than the promotion codes. If you already use coupon code tracking you don't have to change anything in your setup.

Now you'll see another field below the "Tracking coupon code" field, where you can enter the Promotion Code. Since promotion codes are a subset of coupons in Stripe, you'll still need to enter the Stripe Coupon id on "Tracking coupon code" field as before.

new active_customers_count field on API responses and webhooks payload. It represents the paying(non-cancelled) customers. Very helpful on adjusting commission for custom referral programs dependent on the active number of customers a promoter has.

new created_at parameter for cancellation and refund tracking API calls

new added "Blocked" tab on promoters page to see promoters that were banned/blocked 

improvement faster API loading times for accounts with a big amount of data

improvement direct url tracking now works even if you forgot to add "www" in front of the url inserted on "Landing page url" field while the actual page loads with "www".

fix fixed the error on hosted affiliate terms preview

We're happy to announce that Ghost.org Team integrated FirstPromoter with their awesome publishing platform. The integration is so easy that you just need to copy some id from our Settings page and paste it into their FirstPromoter integration page.

You can find more details about it here. Kym from Ghost also wrote a great piece about referral programs for newsletter businesses that you can check out.

Affiliate fraud is real and one of the ugly parts of affiliate marketing. FirstPromoter already has built-in protection against fraud, like generating rewards only when the sale is confirmed on the billing provider, automatic refund tracking or self-referral detection.

However, some companies, because of their industry and type of affiliates that register on their program, have to deal with multiple fraud attempts. To help them out more, we launched 2 new features to increase protection against chargeback fraud and self-referrals. The new features can be found under Settings > Fraud protection tab.

new Require a minimum number of paying customers to generate the payout

This feature almost completely avoids self-referral fraud, where an affiliate signs up from their own referral link to get a commission from their own purchase. The affiliate will need to subscribe at least one other user (or higher, depends on the number you set) to get paid. The users must not be cancelled, they need to be active, paying customers for the payout to be generated.

This also helps around other types of fraud because it becomes harder for the fraudster to create multiple accounts and keep them subscribed.

new Require manual approval for commissions above an amount

On most cases of chargeback fraud, where the affiliate asks for a chargeback after a while or uses stolen credit cards and the bank issues a chargeback, the fraudster subscribes to the high tier/annual plans or makes expensive purchases to receive high commissions. With this feature, you can keep higher commissions as pending until you verify if the customer is a real user (ex. has activity inside your application, has a real email, etc).

Even with these features enabled, the best measure is to manually review and verify each affiliate when they sign up to your program. If some bad actors slip in, you'll have another round of defense against them.

improvement We now support multiple webhook URLs per campaign. This feature lets you handle multiple Zapier triggers or advanced webhooks integrations. You can add up to 3 webhook URLs per campaign.

new We released two new API endpoints to help you manage and automate custom payouts. 

You can now list all your payouts and also change their status to something else - for ex. you can mark the payout as paid (completed status) after your payout provider finishes the payout. More details here.

new There's a new API endpoint to list available commissions/rewards of a promotion, promoter, campaign or the entire account. More info here.

Some other changes:

new you can switch between Stripe test and live mode from Getting Started > Quick setup section (while you are disconnected). You can also see in what mode you're currently connected on.

new added sub-id field on affiliate dashboard rewards export file

new added W8-BEN and W9 download urls on Promoters API response objects

improvement api/v1/leads/list API call is 3 times faster

fix some CSS layout issues on smaller screens

fix W8-BEN/W9 form is also shown in the preview from Campaigns > Configure promoter dashboard if it's activated. Before that, the form was hidden on preview mode.

We're proudly announcing our advanced reporting feature for FirstPromoter. After months of hard work we managed to finish it and now it's available to everyone.

We think it's one of the most complete reporting features out of all affiliate tracking tools on the market right now.

This feature gives an in-depth view of the performance of your affiliates and the program overall across 17 data points grouped by different periods. You can also download the data as both CSV and JSON format.

To get access to the new feature, click on the "Reports" section on the left side-bar.

To learn more about this feature, click here.

improvement We replaced "Signups" field with "Referrals". In most cases referrals are the same as signups, just that they include customers coming from coupon code tracking... basically any person referred by an affiliate (doesn't matter if it converted to customer or not) is a referral.

 improvement We replaced "Cancellations" field with "Cancelled customers". Cancelled customers shows only active customers that cancelled which is more accurate and useful. The old "Cancellations" field showed all cancellation events we recorded, including cancelled free trials or multiple cancellations for the same customer.

improvement You can also see now that the dashboard chart loads so much faster. For companies with a lot of data, even 20x times faster.