We’ve added live traffic so merchants and affiliates can see how many referred visitors are currently on the site, and which sources they came from.

What you get

  • Live count – Number of users who are “online” right now (sent a heartbeat in the last few minutes).
  • Live by referrer – Same users, broken down by where they came from (e.g. affiliate blog, social, search).

Merchants see live traffic for their whole program; affiliates see only traffic they referred.

How it works

  1. When someone clicks an affiliate link and lands on your site, our tracking script starts a heartbeat: about once a minute it tells our servers “this visitor is still here.”
    No form or button — it runs in the background.

  2. One visitor = one ID
    We assign a stable client ID (stored in a cookie on your site) so the same person isn’t counted twice when they move between pages. One browser on your site = one “live” user.

  3. Where they came from
    We record the referrer (the site they came from) the first time we see them. After that, we keep using that first referrer so “live by referrer” stays correct even when they click around your site.

  4. Who counts as “live”
    A user is “live” if they sent a heartbeat in the last N minutes. N is configurable by the platform admin (default 3 minutes). So by default, “live” = anyone who sent a heartbeat in the last 3 minutes.

For merchants

  • Use the same script you already use for affiliate tracking (sdk.js?merchant=...).
  • In your dashboard you’ll see Live now (total) and Live by referrer (per source).
  • No extra integration steps; live traffic appears automatically for referred traffic.

For affiliates

  • In your dashboard you’ll see how many visitors you have live now and how that breaks down by referrer (e.g. your blog vs social vs other links).
  • Helps you see which of your links are driving active traffic at any moment.

Privacy and configuration

  • We only count visitors who came via an affiliate (we have an affiliate context). We don’t track random non-referral traffic for “live.”
  • The live window (how many minutes of heartbeat count as “online”) is set in Admin → Config as Live traffic window (minutes). Default is 3; admins can set it (e.g. between 1–60 minutes) to balance “right now” vs “recently active.”