Topic awaiting preservation: Need initial help on an Affiliate Program

Hi , I've been asked by my boss to work on a simple affiliate program for our portal. I do understand the entire concept of affiliate programs etc but technically I'm stuck.

So far our basic plan is that our affiliates send out emails to potential customers who then if interested sign up and pay for their membership on our portal. I'm kinda stuck on how to track the information of visitors and visitors who sign up with respect to whether they were referred or not and if they were referred then by whom.

Initially I worked on the idea of affiliates sending out preset emails containing a link to the website with the affiliates id included in the url as a parameter. But thats only plausible in situations when a customer clicks on the link in the email and continues to sign up from there. I mean lets say the customer visits the site and doesn't sign up immediately only to signup a few days later - I don't seem to think of any way to track this information as to whether the customer came through a referral or not. Any ideas out there guys

There's not going to be a perfect system.

I would suggest adding a form field for a referral code - allow the user to enter the referral code that the affiliate sends in the email.
Append the referrer ID to the url as you mentioned as well.

You could get into using cookies. But then you get into storing more info on the server side as well - set a cookie when a user visits with an ID appended to the url. Check for cookies when a user is signing up, and match it up accordingly...

Bottom line though, is that you will inevitably get users who were referred that you cannot track properly. Question is how far do you want to go to cut down that number?

I guess I'm spending more effort than is needed on this - its not intended to be very intense to start with. Funny why I never thought of what you just mentioned -just ask the referred user for the referral code . GUess the answers to the seemingly complex problems are rather simple.

Thanks a bunch