This section collects the recommendations we give the most often when reviewing customer setups. Everything here is opinionated — the platform is flexible enough to ignore it, but you’ll save yourself a lot of cleanup work if you follow it from day one.
The four areas
UTM strategy
Naming conventions for source, medium, and campaign that scale beyond a single team.
Attribution
Choose between first-click and last-click, set a reasonable window, and avoid the most common mistakes.
Fraud prevention
Detect bot traffic, click farms, and self-referrals before they cost you money.
Link management
Use folders, tags, retention, and domains so a 10k-link workspace stays navigable.
Where to start
If you’re setting up RevRoute from scratch:
Lock down UTM conventions before publishing any links
Renaming UTMs later splits historical data. Pick a scheme and document it — see UTM strategy.
Decide on an attribution model
Default last-click is right for most affiliate programs. Pick first-click only if your sales cycle is long and you want to credit the partner who introduced the brand. See Attribution.
Enable fraud rules during launch, not after
Bot traffic ramps up the moment partners share links publicly. Turn on IP rate limiting and cooldown periods before going live — see Fraud prevention.
Define a folder and tag taxonomy
A flat workspace works for the first 100 links and then becomes unmanageable. See Link management.
General principles
A few opinions that apply everywhere:
- One source of truth. Don’t track the same conversion both via webhook → CRM and via REST API → CRM. Pick one path; the other becomes shadow data that always disagrees.
- Idempotency keys are not optional. Pass
invoiceId(or your equivalent) on every sale event. RevRoute uses it to deduplicate, so a retry never charges a partner twice. - Test partner-side flows on a staging program. Create a staging program, enroll yourself as a partner, and click your own links monthly. You’ll notice broken redirects and missing UTMs before partners do.
- Treat partner emails like customer emails. A partner who can’t log in or doesn’t get their commission email churns immediately — keep deliverability high.
- Measure cohort by program, not workspace. Aggregate metrics across programs hide the dynamics of each one. Slice by program when reporting.
If anything in this section feels surprising for your use case, please open an issue — these pages are living documents.