A page in the creator's name, with the products shown in the video and the offer already applied. People who click want to find an item they saw thirty seconds earlier and have no intention of browsing your catalog.
At the start of a project, our contact at a brand the authors work with described how they use promo codes: "we hand a promo code to an influencer for a social media shout-out, and also to someone because they lost the pacifier at grandma's."
The line got a laugh around the table, and it describes a catch-all drawer we know well. In Shopify, a campaign code is created on the same screen as the goodwill gesture, and a code with no end date never expires.
The campaign then gets the treatment reserved for customer service fixes: a code in the caption and a link to the homepage.
The benchmark
The instinct is to compare sales made through the link with sales made through the code. As is, the calculation tells you nothing, because the Shopify discount link applies the code to the cart: an order that arrives through the link carries the same code as an order where it was typed by hand, and the discount sales report adds them together.
The fix is two codes per creator. The first is hidden in the link and never spoken aloud. The second is the one people hear in the video.
Orders placed with the second code come from people who returned by another path, and that is exactly the part of the campaign your link can't see.
What happens between the video and the page
Some of these people did click, though. A link placed under a post opens in Instagram's or TikTok's in-app browser, which doesn't share its cookies with Safari or Chrome. The discount applied by the link and the cart stay in that window.
Anyone who closes it to think it over and comes back in the evening from their own browser arrives with no discount and no cart. What's left is the code heard in the video, or a search for "brand name + promo code" that is likely to lead them to a coupon site.
As we see it, the spoken code isn't redundant with the link, since it's the only part of the campaign that survives a change of browser.
It should be short and easy to remember, and the page should be findable without the link, through a URL that people can say out loud.
The rule
The page welcomes the audience by naming the creator, shows their products first and applies the offer without asking anyone to enter anything. On Shopify, a link of the form
votreboutique.fr/discount/CODE?redirect=/pages/prenomapplies the discount, then opens the page of your choice.
The steps
- The page. Create one page per creator and put their product selection right at the top.
- The reminder. Reuse an image or a line from their video to signal in a second that people are in the right place.
- The two codes. Create one code hidden in the link and one short code to say on screen, and give each an end date.
- The short URL. Add a URL redirect like `yourstore.com/firstname` pointing to the page, which the creator can say out loud. Shopify only accepts it if that address doesn't lead anywhere yet.
- The 30-day review. Pull the orders for each code, then give leadership a sentence like this:
"The link recorded X orders, and Y more came in with the code said in the video. The campaign brought in between X and X + Y orders, and that's the range to set against its cost."
The trap
The most common trap is sending everyone to the homepage with a code in the caption.
Visitors look for the product they glimpsed on screen, don't spot it at first glance and leave.
Then there's the code's life after the campaign: with no end date, it circulates on coupon sites, and you keep giving the discount to people who never saw the campaign.
