Configure referral settings

configuring brand level referral settings in roster allows you to customize how ambassadors' referral links are structured and managed for brands using smart links, these settings can be found when set up smart links docid\ ambvb at8xje4wy49t9pe if your brand isn't yet using smart links, these referral settings allow you to define your ambassador's referral link url, enable utm parameters on referral links, and determine whether or not referral links should be customizable by ambassadors below is a guide to help you navigate brand level referral settings in roster video walkthrough video transcript this is a transcript from the loom video walkthrough \[00 00] hey, this is jeff at roster in this video, we're going to walk through some of the brand level referral settings that you can, uhm, configure in your roster account \[00 08] so, to get started, let's click on the brand name or logo in the bottom left, and in the flyout menu, click on brand settings \[00 16] from here, we're going to click on referral settings in the left navigation when this page loads, there's a couple main things that we want to look at \[00 23] first of all, there's, the referral link, and if you are a brand who is using our legacy referral links, uhm, as opposed to our smart links, then this right here forms the basis for all of your ambassador's referral links across your entire account \[00 38] so, everybody will inherit this as the referral link, and the only way to have a different referral link for your ambassadors would be to, at the campaign level, have a different one \[00 48] for the campaign, which is something sometimes brands do for, say, a product launch or a special sale they might put a specific referral link into a campaign, but at a general level, this will be everybody's referral link \[01 02] if you are using smart links, then whenever you turn on smart links for a program for the first time, the default destination url will be whatever is set here, but then you can change it at any point, so each program can have its own referral link \[01 19] so, if you're listening to this and you're using just the standard, and you don't have access to smart links in your program settings, then reach out to your csm to get opted into that beta feature \[01 31] okay, so, uhm, we've talked about the referral link now, underneath it, we have a checkbox, that says, include utm parameters so, this defaults to unchecked, but if you check that, then it will append the utm parameters that you have configured in the utm settings page for referral links \[01 51] so, it gives you a preview here this, of course, isn't real data, but just gives you an idea of what those utm parameters will look like \[01 58] there's three of them right here and, if you want to make any changes to what those utm parameter values are, then you can come to the utm settings page, which is the page right above this, and make those changes there \[02 13] if you are a, if you're dealing with legacy referral links, obviously utm parameters are great, but you can see this is what it does to, all of your ambassador's referral links \[02 26] it's not very pretty uhm, a big benefit of switching over to smart links is that, we hide all of this in a very nice and concise, uh, short link \[02 36] so, your ambassador's referral links are really, really simple looking, but they have all of this kind of behind the scenes, so when it gets redirected to your brand's website, all of these will then get applied, but \[02 48] your ambassadors and their audience will just see a nice clean looking link okay, let's go on to the last setting here \[02 55] this is the referral link format, and the referral link is the part of the referral, whether you're using smart links or legacy referral links, that uniquely identifies the ambassador \[03 08] so, by default, the referral link is customizable by your ambassadors and in a minute here, i will log into an ambassador's account and show you what that looks like \[03 20] there are some cases where brands don't want their ambassadors to customize their referral link all, by default, if you're using legacy referral links, all ambassadors start out with a, a unique number, so it'd be like, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 it wouldn't be their name, but if they wanted to, they \[03 38] could customize it to anything, any value that doesn't have spaces in it, that isn't being used by somebody else, uhm, within your brand \[03 49] if you wanted to change it to fixed, this is a use case that does come up for, for brands from time to time \[03 55] you could set that, and then the ambassadors will no longer be able to modify them their referral link some brands, i'll give you an example of a use case \[04 05] there was, uhm, a brand who, they are a, they are a cell phone carrier, and they wanted everybody's referral links to be their cell phone number, so it was really easy for people to remember \[04 17] so we just had them set this to fixed, and then we showed them how to import the referral link ids \[04 24] and set that value so that, by default, all of their ambassadors had the same value we've had other brands who have migrated over to roster from somewhere else, and they already had the convention they wanted to use \[04 37] so, they simply set it to fixed, and then the ambassadors just got what they got, and weren't able to change it \[04 43] so, i'm going to put it back to customize, and, uhm, let's see here i guess i already had that selected \[04 51] so, okay we'll save that without the links so, that's basically it now, i mentioned that we'll take a look at what is, what is it like from the ambassador's perspective \[05 00] so, let me just come into my programs and make sure okay, so i don't have smart links enabled for the influencer program \[05 08] so, let's go ahead and take a look at, uhm, oops log in as one of the influencers ah, there's actually a global change i need to make \[05 21] so, hold on, i gotta pause this and i'll be right back okay, so i just had to do one thing real quick for my demo account \[05 28] so, this will work so, i've clicked into one of the influencers and that influencer has this as their, uhm, referral link \[05 36] so this is the domain that we saw in the previous page, the referral settings page, and then this is the ambassador's, uh, custom string \[05 44] and we can click on edit here you as the brand can always edit this, so, uhm, you could change it to john g, for example \[05 53] and assuming nobody else is using that value, then it's changeable so, let's go ahead and log in as the ambassador and just see what this looks like \[06 00] from their perspective, so if i click on the see all in the referral section or just click on the referrals tab down here and come to my referral link section, i see a button underneath my referral link that says more options and i can have, i have the option here to customize link and because the referral \[06 20] settings is configured to customizable, then the ambassador in this case, me is able to come in and change this value to something else, whereas if that setting was set to fixed, then there wouldn't be an option to customize the link, just simply wouldn't be here and then they would just be basically \[06 43] constrained to whatever the referral value currently is all right, well, that's it for this video hopefully this makes sense uhm, again, that was largely for brands who are using our legacy referral links \[06 54] if you are using smart links, i guess i could actually show that real quick just to show the correlation if you have smart links enabled and when you come in to configure them, the destination url is the same as that referral url we saw in the previous window \[07 10] this can be changed at any time and you can add parameters to the path as well and that would get results in, uhm, changes to just the ambassadors in this specific program \[07 21] it wouldn't have an impact on ambassadors in your other programs unless you went and changed their smart link settings as well \[07 27] uhm, utm parameters are also configurable at the smart link level, so, uhm, these get defaulted based on your utm settings at the brand level \[07 36] when you're creating a smart link, but then you can edit them at any time and they're just applicable to this program smart links and then in the link appearance section, you see, we have that customizable referral id, uhm, when this is checked, it means that ambassadors can customize that referral \[07 53] id like i just showed you when i logged in as john's ambassador account, if i uncheck it, then it means that they won't have the option to \[08 01] customize their referral link id so that's how you do it at the smart link level okay hopefully that all makes sense \[08 08] if you do have questions, shoot us an email, support at get roster com more than happy to walk through whatever questions you have and in the meantime, have a great day step by step instructions access brand level referral settings click on your brand name or logo located in the bottom of the left hand navigation in the fly out menu, select brand settings when the brand settings modal appears, choose referral settings from the left navigation configure the default referral link review the referral link field if using legacy referral links, this will be the default for all ambassadors' referral links if using smart links, this will be the initial destination url when first setting up a program's smart link, but can be changed independently once the program's smart link is created include utm parameters check the include utm parameters option if desired this will append pre configured utm parameters to referral links for tracking purposes review the utm parameters preview to understand what will be appended to modify utm values, go to the configure utm settings docid 0xf6vlede kz8ki jdjj0 page configure referral link format in the referral link format section decide whether referral links should be customizable or fixed customizable ambassadors can modify their referral link id fixed ambassadors cannot modify their referral link id even if set to fixed , brand can edit ambassadors' referral link ids on the contact detail page, via the import existing ambassadors docid\ qg78rn3yhvrtlwygv8izp , and using the roster api docid\ b zq0pnzwd v i1iirep example use cases for fixed brands wanting uniform referral links (e g , using phone numbers, ids from other platforms) can set the format to fixed brands migrating from other platforms with pre existing conventions can keep consistency by setting the format to fixed ambassador customization experience ambassadors can view and edit their referral link in their ambassador portal account if the link format is customizable if fixed , the customization option will not be visible in the ambassador’s referral settings need help? if you need any additional assistance with with your roster account, feel free to contact our support team at support\@getroster com mailto\ support\@getroster com we're here to help!