Once you have your direct affiliates all set up and thriving, you might want to consider driving your revenue even further by incentivizing them to recruit their own sub-affiliates through our multi-level marketing (MLM) feature.

This feature is available for Starter plans and higher.

This feature allows your affiliates to recruit their own affiliates (sub-affiliates) via their own invite link directly on Trackdesk. The sub-affiliates drive more revenue to you and the direct affiliate gets a set commission from each of the sub-affiliate's conversions as a reward.

First, enable MLM by navigating to Settings -> Affiliates -> MLM Commissions.

Here, you can enable MLM globally, enable MLM for specific affiliates and create multiple MLM tiers and set a commission for each of them. Enabling MLM creates a widget on your affiliate's dashboard with their own registration link. You will be able to see all affiliates and sub-affiliates in your Affiliate list. You can also set the commission amount, this is calculated from the conversion payout amount.

When selecting the individual only option, you have to select specific affiliates that will have the feature allowed i.e. those who will get their own invite link and for whom the system will calculate MLM commissions. To allow access to individual affiliates, simply add them to the list at the bottom of the MLM settings page:

By using the "Edit custom commission" button, you set custom tiers and payout rates for the specific affiliate only. You can also access this setting from the detail of the affiliate from Affiliate list:

As you're setting up the MLM tiers an example payout will be calculated on the page. Commissions for all tiers are paid on top of the conversion payout. If an affiliate who's at the bottom of the MLM pyramid makes a conversion, a commission gets created for each affiliate in an individual tier above them.

Let's say you have a conversion with payout value of 100$ and have setup up 3 MLM levels with commissions being 10%, 5% and 2% per individual levels. An affiliate who's on the bottom of the pyramid makes a conversion. There are three levels above him, so commission gets created for each level totalling to 17% in total, with the final complete payout being 117$.

In a different scenario, an affiliate who's in the second tier of the pyramid makes a conversion with the same amount. There is only one affiliate above him, so only they get credited with the commission on 10%, the final payout for the conversion in this case being 110$.

There are three main places in the system to keep track of MLM metrics: affiliate list, reports and billing.

In the Affiliate list section, you can see if an affiliate has a parent affiliate, directly on the affiliate table, in the affiliate detail modal, you can also see your affiliate's invite link and can directly filter their sub-affiliates.

You can also manually assign a new parent affiliate yourself.

In the Reports section, you can see commission column (which you can optionally hide) in each of the reports. You can also make use of a specific MLM commissions report which keeps track of all commissions and their associated affiliates and conversion states.

Lastly, in the Billing section you can keep track of how much money in affiliate's payout comes from direct conversions and how much they get on commissions. To find this information, navigate to Settled balance click on the settlement detail and press the settled balance eye icon next to the payout to find the division.

By default, you'll find the information about the original source of the conversion in the MLM report (affiliate name and email). In you want, you can enable display of these parameters to affiliates as well by using the "Display conversion affiliate" setting:

Parent affiliate is assigned automatically when affiliate signs up using other affiliate's invite link. You can however assign (or change) parent affiliate manually via affiliate detail in the Affiliate list. In the MLM commissions section of the affiliate, simply select and assign the parent affiliate you'd like. You can always quickly review the assigned parent affiliate in the affiliate list itself.