Looking to payout affiliates a special amount for specific traffic? NATS offers a way for Admins to create special payout changes which will effect the payments made to an affiliate. Payout changes can be set with criteria specific to Affiliates, Sites, Tours, Billers, Options, and Countries This special payout change can be set up to happen one time, at a certain time, recurring over time, or even allow you to disable payouts altogether. You can even target the payment to affect specific sites, tours, billers, options and a member's country of origin.

To create a new payout change, go to the Programs Admin. Find the program to which you want to add a payout change and click on the "Edit Payout Changes"() icon. This page will allow you to manage any currently set payout changes for this program, as well as add new changes. To get started, click the tab labeled "Add Payout Change". You will be asked to define whether the change is specific to an affiliate, site, tour, biller, option or country this will affect. You will also define what type of payout change this will be. This will include:

• Standard changes allows you to set a completely new payout given the set criteria.
• Disable payout is when you don't want to payout affiliates at all, typically used for in-house affiliate accounts.
• Temporary change allows you to set a time frame this payout change is used, useful when setting up promotional periods for your affiliates.
• Tiered payout change allows you to set up a tiered payout program for your affiliates where they earn more payout the more signups that they get.
• Recurring Change allows you to set up a change similar to a Temporary change, only this payout will recur so you don't need to set up multiple temporary changes.

Once the criteria has been set and saved, the next page allows you to set the new payout(s) for this change, as well as any special settings for this change.

For further information in regards to setting up payout changes, visit our wiki article here.

Admins can either copy existing payout dumps or create their own NATS provides Admins the ability to create new payment dump formats for all available payment methods. A payment dump is a file exported from NATS that contains a list of affiliate payment transactions. This file will have a specific structure that matches what a payment processor or an accounting program needs to import the transactions. Creating additional payment dumps formats may help Admins by providing multiple to their specific business needs.

Additional Payment dumps are created and managed in the "Dump Formats" section of your Payments Admin. Once on this page you can create a new dump format by either copying an existing dump format using the copy button, or create your own by filling in the "New Dump Format Name" box at the bottom and clicking add. After creating a new payment dump format, you have the ability to adjust or set special sections. These display information at the top and bottom of the dump entirely, at the beginning and end of all the affiliates payments, and for each individual payment itself.

For more details on setting up a new payment dump format, visit our online documentation For details on what variables are available for each dump format visit our online documentation here.

Available as a NATS add-on, the "Gallery Builder" module allows Admins to provide special templates and content sets so Affiliates can set up their own free hosted galleries. As a result, affiliates can promote a large array of galleries from a minimal amount of templates and content.

Select the allowed content in templates after content is imported

To make things simple, Gallery builder was designed so that all of the content can be set up on your server in a single location. Your content files should follow a simple and specific naming convention that will be consistent with your Gallery Builder templates. Once your content is set in their respective folders, your templates would need to be set to use these general thumbnail and image names based on the naming convention you have set. Once the content sets and templates are set up, you would add both the location of the templates and the names of the content set in NATS as the adtool types "gbtemplate" and "gbcontent", respectively. After templates and content are added into NATS, you can set which content options are available for each template. This will then allow affiliates to choose the templates and content sets they wish to use, and NATS will provide the necessary links with their NATS code.

This powerful, easy to use module can be added on to your NATS install for a small one-time fee. To request this module, please put in a support ticket here. Once installed, additional details on Gallery Builder can be found in our online documentation.

Deep linking within NATS allows either the owner or affiliate to link to a specific page of the specified tour by adding text after the NATS tracking link itself. This feature allows for more precise redirect for the surfer and can allow your affiliates to take a more active roll at sending traffic to your site by providing links to your specific areas of your tour page.

Any NATS tracking link can be deep linked and it is as easy as adding text to the end of the NATS link itself. If you have a specific page you would like surfers directed to (eg: tour2.html) you or your affiliates would just add that to the end of a NATS code link (http://join.example.com/track/MjozOjE/tour2.html). Additionally, NATS has a special deep link setting which will direct a surfer directly to the join page of the site while going through a track link. This involves just adding "join" to the end of the NATS tracking link (http://join.example.com/track/MjozOjE/join).

For additional information on using deep linking with your NATS tracking links, visit our online documentation here.

Previous Issues of TMM Insider can be found at our archive here.