Affiliate Leaderboards

Overview

Many businesses leverage an affiliate sales model. Infusionsoft supports such models with their referral partner functionality.

Affiliate leaderboards are typically used to increase the effectiveness of affiliate sales and promotional campaigns by encouraging competition between affiliates.

The iMember360 Affiliate Leaderboards are designed to work with Infusionsoft invoice data i.e. the completed sale data. They do not work with referral partner click data nor commission data.

An Infusionsoft Referral Partner is automatically associated to Infusionsoft invoice data based upon your Infusionsoft Referral Partner Default settings.

When an invoice is fully paid any Referral Partner data associated with that invoice is used in calculating the affiliate leaderboards.

Activate Affiliate Leaderboards Extension

Steps to activate Affiliate Leaderboards Extension
Steps to activate Affiliate Leaderboards extension
  1. In WordPress administrator main navigation click iMember360, Extensions.
  2. In iMember360 Extensions tabs click Affiliate Leaderboards.
  3. Set Enable the Leaderboard extension to Yes.
  4. Click Save Changes.

Adding Affiliate Leaderboards

Steps to add an Affiliate Leaderboard
Steps to add an Affiliate Leaderboard
  1. To add a new affiliate leaderboard click Leaderboards in the WordPress administrator main navigation.
  2. Select the Leaderboards tab.
  3. If this is the first ever affiliate leaderboard you have defined for the site continue to step 4 or otherwise click on Add New Leaderboard.
  4. From the Status drop down select Active or Inactive as required. Only active leaderboards are calculated or available for display.
  5. The Leaderboard ID is automatically generated when the leaderboard is saved. It is used to uniquely identify the leaderboard.
  6. Specify a name for your leaderboard.
  7. Select your chosen Referral start date.

    This is the date before which no referrals are included in the calculation of the affiliate leaderboard.

    If left blank the affiliate leaderboard calculation will begin with the first ever invoice stored within Infusionsoft.
  8. Select your chosen Referral end date

    This is the date after which no referrals are included in the calculation of the affiliate leaderboard.

    If left blank the affiliate leaderboard calculation will always include the latest invoice stored within Infusionsoft.
  9. Select the number of Positions shown for the leaderboard. This is the maximum number of affiliates that will be shown on the leaderboard based upon their ranking for the criteria chosen in step 10.
Steps for choosing the ranking criteria for an affiliate leaderboard
Steps for choosing the ranking criteria for an affiliate leaderboard
  1. From the Rank affiliates based upon drop down select the ranking criteria used to calculate the affiliate leaderboard.

    There are three choices:

    Number of sales by invoice count – This is a count of the number of paid invoices where a referral partner is associated as the sales referral partner with the invoice.

    Number of leads by invoice count – This is a count of the number of paid invoices where a referral partner is associated as the lead referral partner with the invoice.

    Total invoice amount – This is a summation of all paid invoice amounts where a referral partner is associated with the invoice. The currency shown is that set within the connected Infusionsoft application.
Steps for choosing the products used for ranking an affiliate leaderboard
Steps for choosing the products used for ranking an affiliate leaderboard
  1. From the Product selection drop down select if the affiliate leaderboard should be based upon All products or only Selected products.

    If All products is selected and Total invoice amount has been chosen for Rank affiliates based upon in step 10 the total invoice amount will be calculated using the total invoice value irrespective of the number of line items/individual products on any invoice. This will also include any tax amount.

    If Selected products is selected and Total invoice amount has been chosen for Rank affiliates based upon in step 10 you can chose the Calculation base in step 13.

Steps for choosing the selected products used for ranking an affiliate leaderboard
Steps for choosing the selected products used for ranking an affiliate leaderboard
  1. From the Products drop down select the Infusionsoft products/subscriptions to be used when calculating the affiliate leaderboard.

    Click the drop down then scroll or start typing any consecutive characters of the product name to refine the list and aid selection.

    Then click on the required product.

    Multiple products can be selected as required.

    Individual products can be removed from the selection by clicking on the x shown next to the individual product/subscription name.

    All products/subscriptions can be removed from the selection by clicking on the x shown in the far right of the drop down.
Steps for choosing the calculation basis for an affiliate leaderboard
Steps for choosing the calculation basis for an affiliate leaderboard
  1. From the Calculation base drop down select if the affiliate leaderboard should be Calculated upon total amount invoiced or Calculated upon selected products amount invoiced.

    This selection will only be available if Selected products is selected in step 11 and Total invoice amount has been chosen for Rank affiliates based upon in step 10

    Calculated upon total amount invoiced – Using this basis the total amount of any invoice containing any of the selected products will be used in the calculation of the affiliate leaderboard irrespective of the number of line items/individual products on any invoice. If your invoices typically contain only a single product i.e. are from order form submissions this is the recommended setting however the total will include any taxes.

    Calculated upon selected products amount invoiced – Using this basis the invoice value of each individual selected product is extracted from each invoice and used in the calculation of the affiliate leaderboard. This is the most accurate method of determining the affiliate leaderboard but it does have resource and performance implications when calculating the leaderboards so should only be selected when absolutely necessary. The total will not include taxes.

  2. Once the settings have been completed ensure Save Settings is clicked to save the defined affiliate leaderboards.

Removing Affiliate Leaderboards

Remove for removing affiliate leaderboards
Steps for removing affiliate leaderboards

You can remove affiliate leaderboards by moving your cursor into the affiliate leaderboard title area. A Remove link will then be shown that when clicked will remove the affiliate leaderboard.

The Remove link is only shown if more than one affiliate leaderboard is defined.

Reordering Affiliate Leaderboards

Steps for reordering affiliate leaderboards
Steps for reordering affiliate leaderboards

Where multiple affiliate leaderboards have been added/created you can reorder the leaderboards by moving your cursor into the affiliate leaderboard title area. The cursor will show as a cross-hair and on holding down the left mouse button you can drag the leaderboard and release to change the order.

Reordering is available to solely aid the management of the affiliate leaderboards defined.

Calculating Affiliate Leaderboards

The first affiliate leaderboard added, when saved, will trigger the calculation of the leaderboard. Calculated leaderboards are then cached(stored) within the WordPress database.

Thereafter the affiliate leaderboards are only calculated/recalculated when the cached data expires or when a user forces a recalculation.

The calculation of leaderboards requires iMember360 to retrieve all invoice data from Infusionsoft from the earliest Referral start date for the defined affiliate leaderboards. Once all data has been retrieved each affiliate leaderboard can be calculated. This process can be resource intensive in terms of API calls and further processing so can impact on the performance of your WordPress site.

It is for these reasons that affiliate leaderboards are cached.

Be aware that any affiliate leaderboard that has been previously calculated and exists in the current cache will remain in that state if made inactive. When again made active the cached leaderboard will not necessarily be based upon the most current invoice data until a cache refresh is triggered.

Follow the steps below to specify the cache frequency, force a manual cache refresh and specify a referral partner ignore list:

Steps for setting options for calculating the affiliate leaderboards
Steps for setting options for calculating the affiliate leaderboards
  1. To add a new affiliate leaderboard click Affiliate Leaderboards in the WordPress administrator main navigation.
  2. Select the Advanced tab.
  3. From the Cache refresh frequency select the required frequency of either Twice Daily, Daily, or Weekly.

    The default is Daily and is the most appropriate for most cases.

    The active affiliate leaderboards will be automatically recalculated when the cache expires.
  4. To Manually refresh cache click on Refresh leaderboards now.

    Typically you would manually refresh the cache and force the recalulation of the active affiliate leaderboards after adding or modifying leaderboards. Also when making modifications to the Ignore List see below.
  5. In the Ignore List specify a comma delimited (csv – comma separated values) list of Infusionsoft referral partner IDs.

    These referral partners will be automatically excluded from the calculation of all active leaderboards.

    The primary purpose of this settings is to exclude internal referral partners from the affiliate leaderboards.

When the affiliate leaderboards cache is being refreshed or calculated you will see one of the following messages in the WordPress backend:

When the affiliate leaderboard calculations are complete you will see either no messages in the WordPress backend or that below:

Displaying Affiliate Leaderboards

When an affiliate leaderboard is active you can display the leaderboard anywhere on your site using the [i4w_leaderboard] shortcode.

You would use the leaderboard shortcode to display the leaderboard anywhere that supports the use of shortcodes.

This allows you to display the affiliate leaderboard in:

  • Post/page content
  • Post/page excerpts
  • …and many custom post types
  • …and page builders that support shortcodes such as:
    • Beaver Builder
    • Elementor
    • Gutenberg
    • Oxygen Builder
    • Thrive Architect
    • Divi
    • OptimizePress
    • etc.

The shortcode is used in the same way as any WordPress/iMember360 shortcode and relies on the leaderboard ID.

The leaderboard ID can be determined as shown below:

Determining the leaderboard ID
Determining the leaderboard ID

When viewing leaderboards the leaderboard id is shown in each leaderboard title area and also in the Leaderboard shortcodes panel on the right of the screen.

For convenience the required shortcode can be copied from the Leaderboard shortcodes panel.

So if the following was placed in the post content the affiliate leaderboard with ID 9291 would be shown:

[i4w_leaderboard id=’9291′]


For full details of the [i4w_leaderboard] shortcode please visit the following article [i4w_leaderboard].

Only affiliate leaderboards with an active status and that are not empty are displayed using the shortcode.

The affiliate leaderboard displayed will be that previously calculated and stored in the affiliate leaderboard cache. If the affiliate leaderboard is not available from the cache nothing will be shown. In this case you should force a recalculation of the affiliate leaderboards please refer to Calculating Affiliate Leaderboards.

Formatting Affiliate Leaderboards

The affiliate leaderboards by default take their styling from the WordPress theme, or other CSS definitions on your site, and the CSS provided by iMember360.

You can style the leaderboards to your own preferences using custom CSS.

For full details please visit the following article [i4w_leaderboard].