Start with the tiers
Tiers are what make a sub-affiliate worth anything. A campaign needs at least two commission tiers before sub-affiliates can earn for the people above them, and HighLevel allows up to seven payable tiers on a campaign.
Configure the tiers and their rates on the campaign first. Every sub-affiliate setting further down this page depends on them, and an affiliate's own settings can only adjust rates on tiers the campaign already has.
Three ways a sub-affiliate joins
HighLevel supports three routes into a network. Decide which ones your program will use before you build.
- Manual assignment. You place an affiliate under a parent yourself. Good for partners you recruited directly.
- Customer auto-enrollment. A customer becomes a sub-affiliate of the affiliate who referred them. This happens after a successful referred sale, not every time a lead fills in a form.
- Self-recruitment. An affiliate shares a sign-up page, and people who join through it land under that affiliate.
Setting up each route
Do these after the campaign's tiers are saved.
- Manual: open the parent affiliate's profile, go to Sub-Affiliate, click Add Sub-Affiliate, choose the campaign and the affiliate, and save.
- Self-recruitment: in the campaign, go to Additional Settings > Sub-Affiliate Sign-Up Page, select a form that qualifies and save. The form must ask for First Name, Last Name and Email.
- Customer enrollment: in the campaign, turn on Auto Enroll New Customers as Sub-Affiliates.
- Run one test of each route you turned on and confirm the new person appears under the right parent.
No second tier, no sub-affiliates. Set the tiers before anything else.
How far down a sale pays
Recruitment and payment don't have the same depth. People can recruit people who recruit people, further down than the campaign has tiers. Those extra levels exist in the network, but they don't create extra payable tiers.
When a sale happens, commission eligibility runs backward: from the affiliate who made the sale, up through the eligible uplines above them, until the campaign's tiers run out. Anyone above that point earns nothing on that sale, however many people they recruited.
So when an affiliate asks why their recruits' recruits aren't paying them, count the campaign's tiers before you suspect tracking.
Rather have it set up for you?
From a 30-minute 1:1 with Rob, we work out your tiers and sub-affiliate routes, then build them and test a sale through every level.
Level-Up is a different tool
Level Up to another Campaign, under Commissions, promotes an affiliate into another campaign once they pass a threshold in Customers or Revenue. You choose the destination campaign and whether their existing customers stay where they are or move with them, then review and publish the setup.
It doesn't place anyone under anyone. Level-Up changes which campaign an affiliate belongs to; sub-affiliate settings change who sits under whom. Don't use one to do the other's job.
Know its edges before you rely on it. Level-Up works within one account and doesn't accept tags as qualifying criteria. There's no pause button: selecting No level up campaign is how you switch it off. And we haven't seen a native rule that moves an affiliate back down, so check the current screen if you need one.
Settings that only reach new campaigns
Changes in Affiliate Manager's Global Settings apply to campaigns you create afterwards. Existing campaigns keep what they had, so a campaign that's already running has to be changed in its own settings.
If people report errors on the sub-affiliate sign-up page, check the form first. Errors there can mean one of the required fields is missing.