How to track referrals

Creating a network of trusted partners that help you to bring more students to your workshops is an important step in making your training business more profitable. It is usually done via referrals where each partner gets a unique referral code that later allows detecting who brought a specific student and sharing the income.

Though Workshop Butler doesn't support referral codes out-of-the-box yet, you can easily replicate a required behavior with just a few changes to your account and website integration plugins. 

Important: at this moment, only JS widgets and direct API calls support referrals. WordPress plugin and built-in registration pages do not support this functionality yet.

Configure registration form

First thing first - you need to save referrals when an attendee registers for an event. To do that, add a new field to your registration form. We highly recommend making this field optional otherwise students won't be able to register without filling in the field. 

When the field is created, copy its ID as you will need it in the next step. 

Tip: in most cases, you would need just one field, like referral, to track people coming from partners' websites. However, you may decide to add an additional layer of details by tracking pages of partners' websites, or specific promo campaigns. In this case, just add as many fields as needed for your purposes.

Configure website integration

We assume that you use query string parameters in the URL to pass referral values. For example, if the path to a registration form is https://yourwebsite.com/register-to-major-event, then your partner would use this URL on their website: https://yourwebsite.com/register-to-major-event?referral=wow_3 where wow_3 is a partner's unique code. 

Change a configuration of the Registration Page widget

Before jumping into action, let me briefly explain how it works.

1. The Registration Page widget looks for the specified search parameters in the URL
2. It passes their values into the form fields. You define what should be passed (names of search parameters) and where to pass it (names of form fields). 
3. When a visitor fills in the rest of the fields and makes the payment, Workshop Butler saves all data including the values the widget grabbed from the URL to the profile of the attendee. 

Now it's time for some website tweaking. 

1

Check the version of the installed Registration Page widget. It must be 1.17 or higher. To do that, look for the paths of Workshop Butler widgets. They have the version at the end:

https://cdn.workshopbutler.com/widgets.1.16.js

2

Add new parameter forwardSearchParams to the configuration. The parameter accepts an array of objects with properties:

• name - (required) name of the search parameter. From the example above, it will be referral
• to - (optional) name of the field to fill in the value of the parameter. From the example above, it will be 0421dc07. You can skip this property. In this case, the widget assumes that the name of the form field equals the name of search parameter
• hidden - (optional) set to true if you want the widget to hide the field. Otherwise, the field is kept visible with pre-filled value taken from the search parameter, and visitors could easily change it. The widget shows the field if the related search parameter is empty.

Below is the example of the configuration with comments explaining how it works.

3

Go and test that everything works as expected. Time for sending out referral codes to your business partners!

(optional) Change a configuration of the Event Page widget

Previous chapter assumes that your partners link directly to the registration form which may not be the best scenario for you. Sometimes you prefer to lead visitors to a page with detailed description to the event (eg Event Page) where they click Register button. To handle this case correctly, you need to modify a configuration of the Event Page widget.

1

Check the version of the installed Event Page widget. It must be 1.17 or higher. To do that, look for the paths of Workshop Butler widgets. They have the version at the end:

https://cdn.workshopbutler.com/widgets.1.16.js

2

Add a new parameter forwardSearchParams to the configuration. The parameter can have these values:

• true - all search parameters will be forwarded to the registration form. From the example above, it will be referral
• names of search parameters, separated by comma - only named search parameters will be forward to the registration form. For example, for the parameter forwardSearchParams: 'referral,name,age' and url https://example.com?referral=wow_30&age=32&book=harrypotter only referral and age are forwarded.

3

Go and test that everything works as expected. Time for sending out referral codes to your business partners!