F.A.Q.

  1. Does the post purchase script need to capture all purchases or just Talkable purchases?

  2. How does referral tracking work?

  3. What does the Talkable integration do?

  4. How does Talkable know where to display content?

  5. What do I, as a developer, need to do to complete integration?

  6. How does the rewarding process work?

  7. How do I verify success?

1.) Does the post purchase script need to capture all purchases or just Talkable purchases?

The post purchase script needs to capture all purchases. This not only simplifies the integration by removing any logic you need to perform on your end to determine if a purchase is referral related but is required so that Talkable can perform referral tracking which happens after the purchase is captured. Talkable also reports on referral related sales metrics to display what % of total sales referrals is responsible for along with other sales related metrics.

2.) How does referral tracking work?

Talkable automatically handles all referral tracking, so there’s nothing special you need to do as a developer. Talkable tracks referrals by at least 1 of 3 possible tracking methods: {cookie, coupon code, and email}. The most common tracking method is cookie, so if your ecommerce platform is unable to surface coupon code as a parameter to pass at checkout, then that’s fine as Talkable will still be able to track the referral.

3.) What does the Talkable integration do?

  • Displays Refer-A-Friend content inside a Talkable generated iframe either as an overlay or inline

  • Handles all button click events, and mobile responsive resizing

  • Tracks referral attribution automatically

  • Blocks self-referral and gaming of the system

  • Handles all other referral related logic and communications

    • Decides where to show content on your website based on rules defined inside of the Talkable platform

    • Sends referral p2p and reward emails on your behalf

4.) How does Talkable know where to display content?

  • “Placements” refer to areas of your website where referral content should display. These rules are defined inside of the Placements section inside the Talkable platform.

    • You can modify default placements, add additional placements, or create various inclusion or suppression rules in the Talkable Placements section. This allows for future placement modification with minimal to zero developer work required.

    • See Talkable Placements documentation for more details: Campaign Placements

  • Talkable looks at the URL to determine display as defined by rules in the Placements section. Most integrations will be able to use default placements where no modification is necessary inside the Talkable platform.

  • Default Placements:

    • Share Widget Campaign: All pages (inclusion and exclusion rules can be defined)

    • Post Purchase Popup Campaign: Checkout confirmation page where the post purchase integration script resides.

    • Advocate Landing Page Invite Campaign: URL ending in “/share”

    • Referral Dashboard Campaign: URL ending in “/referrals”

5.) What work do I, as a developer, need to do to complete integration?

  • Surface variables, plug into integration script, and copy into the appropriate locations.

  • Create HTML pages for Advocate Landing Page and Referral Dashboard and paste the Talkable Container DIV in the body

    • Create a link to the Referral Dashboard from your user accounts section or drop down menu

  • Validate your integration to verify success

  • (optional) DNS configuration for referral link and email sending subdomain white labeling (ask your Talkable contact to enable this)

6.) How does the rewarding process work?

Referring Advocate Reward payout is configurable, it can be triggered automatically based on any grace period delay, through API call when considering returns, or through manual approval. Once a reward is approved, Talkable sends an email that communicates/delivers the reward. Most customers choose auto approval after a 24-48 delay, which requires little to no attention.

Here’s how reward flow and logic works:

After Talkable tracks the referred purchase we run it through two sets of filters: fraud filters, and then campaign qualifiers.

  • Fraud filters will check for things such as self referral, cross referral, similar email match, matching ip + device, matching shipping address, etc.

  • Campaign qualifiers are checked once fraud filters are passed. This contains the campaign referral logic that determines when a reward is due, such as: is the friend a new customer?, did the friend spend > $X?, etc.

Reward approval

Once a referred purchase is qualified in passing through both of these filters, the reward is now in a pending state and ready to be approved/paid. Most companies turn on auto reward approval which will auto approve the reward after some grace period. Approval can be configured via API if return rate is abnormally high, but considering that standard Advocate reward redemption rate is between 20-30% this is typically not necessary.

API approval to account for returns

The way this works is that you would ping Talkable on all orders that reach some final valid or failed state. This uses lazy logic so you don’t need to know if a purchase is referral related or not, Talkable will determine this. So any order# you ping us with that’s not related to a pending referral, we’ll gracefully ignore, and any order# we recognize as related to a pending referral, we’ll take the appropriate action.

7.) How do I verify success?

Refer to the section titled Validating the Integration.