When a Publisher signs up to join our network, they are allocated a unique Publisher ID (Awin provides one Publisher ID per Publisher, referred to as a PID, such as 999999). This ID is then embedded into the tracking URLs that Publishers use to promote the Brand’s products and services. Within this link, Publishers can use click references to differentiate between websites or promotional slots.
A tracking link can look like this:
https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?awinmid=000000&awinaffid=99999
When a user clicks on this link, they are directed to the retailer’s website, and because the publisher’s ID is embedded into the referral link, as well as the brand’s advertiser ID, it enables specific attribution to the Publisher and Advertiser that were involved in the sale, allowing the commission to be paid out accurately too. It is this aspect of tracking that allows us to identify the different Publisher types that are driving growth to a specific Advertiser programme, such as a cashback publisher or a discount publisher. The brand may have agreed for each of these publisher types to have different commission amounts per sale, and therefore the uniqueness of each publisher link helps to enable this flexibility within the program set up.
Through Awin's Commission Manager tool, more visibility is given to both Advertiser and Publisher on their past, current and future commission rates, which improves the accuracy of attribution to publisher transactions.
So if you have ever bought through a cashback site and had your cashback track into your online account, the retailer will have employed a specific publisher model to track the sale and commission. That said, not all networks give a unique PID to each publisher; instead they assign the PID to each link, so on alternative networks to Awin, the publishers may have several PIDs due to the fact that they have several links or several websites.
