What Is An Affiliate Link?

So we have just learned that affiliate marketing is basically selling other people’s product and getting an affiliate commission in return. The question is how the heck do these networks know that it’s me that sold the product and not the other affiliates? The answer is it could be determined through your affiliate links.

Affiliate links are simply unique links which determines whether the certain product being promoted is under you or others. What’s the difference of affiliate links from normal links? Take a look:

http://teethwhitening.com/?213123 or http://affiliates.network.com/9689

http://teethwhitening.com/

It’s easy to notice that the first and second url is the affiliate link. The text highlighted in red is the unique number for each affiliates. Of course it varies depending on affiliate network and cloaking links which we will discuss in future posts. You can also see in the other link that it’s a little different from the first. Why? As time passes by, affiliate networks has largely evolved. The second link is just a ‘jump link’ which when clicked, would  also go directly to the first link. This has been done so affiliates could have better conversions and for the networks to have easier time in tracking. With that unique referral key, affiliate networks could easily track details such as clicks, impressions, conversions and etc. The third link, on the other hand is the direct link of the merchant. If someone purchases under that link, the merchant would get 100% of the revenue since it’s not an affiliate link

Just remember not to forget embedding your referral link to your landing page instead of just the direct link or you’ll just be wasting your time. In our future posts, we would be tackling ways on how to hide and cloak links for better conversions, so stay tuned!