django-affiliates

Django affiliates is a reusable application for Affiliate Marketing (inbound, you are the one who is paying the aliliates money) Capmaign tracking and other pay per preformance marketing approaches.

It is in early development, although parts of it have been in use since a few years.

Currently it only supports Campaign and Conversion tracking.

Usage

The dependencies for django-affiliates can be found in the file requirements.txt. If you have pip installed, you can install all dependencies with the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then you have to configure your Django Project. Add 'affiliates.middleware.AffiliatesMiddleware', after the line that reads 'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware', in the MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES section of your settings.py file. Also add 'affiliates', in the INSTALLED_APPS section. Your settings.py should have now the following settings (besides other stuff):

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'affiliates.middleware.AffiliatesMiddleware',
)

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'affiliates',
)

Finally create the needed database tables:

python manage.py syncdb affiliates

This should have automatically created an campaign with the ID "dcTESTESTESTESTESTESTESTESTE". Campaigns are the categories in which you do tracking. Every affiliate is associated (one to one) with an campain but you can also use campains to track other things, e.g. movements of visitors between your different Web properties or effectiveness of advertising.

Tracking is done by appending ?aff=<campagin id> to the URL. This will fill request.session['campaign'] of the current sessions with the campain id. It also will register the visit as an "inflow" in the Database.

To register "conversions" ("goals": sales, subscriptions, whatever) you need to call affiliates.regcon_by_request() at the location where the actual Conversion happens. Usualy that is the checkout of your Shop, or the sign-up form of your Newsletter, or whatever.

The most important parameter to regcon_by_request() is the value, This is an integer number representing the value of the goal. For a newsletter subscription it might be always "1". For a Shopping Cart you probably want to use the cart's monetary value.

Keep in Mind, that you can only use Integers. So if You use a float or a Decimal() to represent prices, probably the best thing is to multiply and use the smallest currency unit of your Country (e.g. "cent" for Europe).

Other Parameters are reference which should be an ID for the transaction triggering the conversion. Usually this should be the order number or something like that and the parameter text could be a human readable description of the transaction.

As a concrete example your checkout-view in your shop might look like this:

...
order = Order.objects.create(price=16.95, shipping=4.50, ...)
affiliates.regcon_by_request(request, order.price*100,
                          reference='order%d' % order.id,
                          text='Customer order %s' % order.id)
return render_to_response(...)