How To Use Affiliate Leaderboard To Inspire Top Performance

Affiliate leaderboards are a unique motivational tool that affects performance and partners’ curiosity. For a typical WordPress store, affiliate leaderboards are used internally or on dedicated affiliate pages for recruitment, so they reach the target audience on the right pages.

In this article, we’re explaining how affiliate leaderboards function and how to add one to your WordPress. We’ll also share some great tips on how to place leaderboards on your site to make the most out of them.

TL;DR. Affiliate leaderboards display top-performing partners based on metrics like commissions, referrals, and sales. With AffiliatePress, you can easily add a dynamic leaderboard to WordPress using a shortcode and place it on affiliate pages or private dashboards to motivate partners and attract new affiliates.

What type of leaderboard can you create with AffiliatePress?

AffiliatePress is the affiliate management plugin for WordPress, which allows you to build a powerful affiliate system along with any WordPress plugin for ecommerce, such as WooCommerce or EDD. Leaderboards are just one of the powerful features of the plugin.

1. What Is AffiliatePress Leaderboard and What Is Its Purpose?

The AffiliatePress Leaderboard by AffiliatePress allows you to display a dynamic ranking of your top-performing affiliates directly on your WordPress website. It uses the data from your current affiliates’ stats and performance and displays as a leaderboard automatically.

The leaderboard uses key performance metrics such as:

• Total earned commissions
• Number of commissions generated
• Referral visits
• Total sales activity

The leaderboard is sortable by column, making it easy to rank affiliates by the metric that matters most to your program.

However, AffiliatePress makes it easy to customize a leaderboard in a way that protects the rights of your affiliates. If you choose to show it, the add-on allows you to:

1. Allow nickname display (not full names) using a ‘username’ option in a shortcode.
2. Hide raw revenue/exact earnings by excluding ‘commission amount’ from the shortcode.
3. Let it update dynamically (no need to update periodically).

Affiliate leaderboards like this are good at:

• Motivating affiliates to improve their results (especially directed at top performance-driven partners).
• Encourage healthy competition.
• Publicly recognize top contributors.
• Increase overall engagement and sales within your affiliate program.

2. What Is Required to Get Started?

Before creating a leaderboard, you’ll need to complete two simple setup steps:

1. Activate the AffiliatePress Pro plugin.
2. Enable the AffiliatePress Leaderboard addon directly from the Add-ons menu (if you can’t activate it, download it first from your AffiliatePress account, then install and activate it on your WordPress).

Once both are activated, the leaderboard functionality becomes available and ready to use on your website.

There’s no complex configuration required to get started; the system automatically pulls performance data from your affiliate program.

3. How to Create and Display a Leaderboard

The add-on makes it super straightforward – you only need to decide where it should appear.

To add the leaderboard to your site, follow these steps: 

1. Go to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Create a new page or edit an existing one.
3. Insert the leaderboard shortcode into the content area: [affiliatepress_affiliate_leaderboard]. To customize what information should be displayed using this shortcode, use the docs for shortcode parameters (more info below).
4. Publish or update the page.

By default, the leaderboard will display the top 10 affiliates of all time, ranked by total earned commission. You can customize the leaderboard with these parameters and details:

• The number of affiliates displayed.
• The date range (e.g., this month, last week, this year).
• The columns shown (username, commissions, visits, etc.).
• The ranking criteria (e.g., commission amount, referral visits, number of sales).

Multiple parameters can be combined in a single shortcode, allowing you to create monthly contests, yearly rankings, or custom performance views tailored to your affiliate program.

When to display the “Top affiliates” leaderboard on your site?

Of course, you don’t want people who purchase from you to see leaderboards of those who advertise you.

However, there are legitimate use cases – just usually not customer-facing product pages. And we’re describing them below:

1. Recruitment-focused affiliate program pages

The page that your customers normally don’t visit (unless they want to become affiliates). If you’re actively trying to attract new affiliates, a leaderboard can:

• Show proof your program is active.
• Demonstrate earning potential.
• Add social proof for potential partners.

2. Private affiliate portals & memberships

WordPress makes it easy to create password-protected pages for various reasons, e.g. communities and pages for internal use.

With plugins like ARMember, which seamlessly work with AffiliatePress, you can build dedicated communities within your WordPress store, where affiliates can log in and participate.

For your partners, it can be a true gem of resources, experience sharing, and staying motivated!

Moreover, ARMember takes it further with public walls, private messages, and full-scale social networks. This is exactly the space you can display an affiliate leaderboard if you want to:

• Create competition
• Encourage performance
• Drive engagement
• Give a platform for experience sharing

You can also use any WordPress forum plugins to create simpler board discussions and showcase an affiliate leaderboard within them.

3. Other places to display top affiliates to inspire top performers

Dedicated “Affiliate Program” pages work just fine on pages like:

• Affiliate program
• Partner dashboard
• Inside logged-in affiliate area

On your company blog, you may also run contest campaigns and publicly share affiliate leaderboards, e.g. “Q1 Top Performers”.

You may publish stories like “Affiliate Spotlight”, case studies, interviews, and earnings milestones. This humanizes, in addition to just gamification

Moreover, if you send newsletters to your affiliates, you can create a leaderboard on a private page of your WordPress site, make a screenshot of it, and attach it to affiliate newsletters.

When it doesn’t make sense to display leaderboards

You don’t want regular customers to see affiliate leaderboards on the price, reviews, trust signals, and delivery info pages. It can look manipulative and signal messages like “We push affiliates hard”, “This is heavily promoted”. This may reduce authenticity.

Conclusion: How To Use Affiliate Leaderboard & Inspire Top Partners

Affiliate leaderboards are great for monthly contests, highlighting long-term top performers, and adding some transparency and gamification to your affiliate strategy.

With affiliate leaderboards, you can increase affiliate recruitment and motivate affiliates, especially top performers with strategic marketing and privately displayed leaderboards. So, here is what you can do:

1. Create a dynamic affiliate leaderboard with AffiliatePress.
2. Display affiliate leaderboards in admin dashboard widgets, private affiliate portals, membership pages, blog posts, newsletters and site pages dedicated to affiliates.
3. Build a competitive atmosphere to inspire top performers.

You May Also Like:

• 5 Things You Can Learn From Your Affiliate Program Competitors
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• How to Find Affiliates Who Actually Convert (Proven Strategies)