I just discovered an affiliate program that is using Clean Linking to track where the sales are coming from. This is new to me, but what I want to know is..can this method of tracking affiliate links be trusted? It feels a little fishy to me.. Fabian
Affiliate marketers always seem to be wary of new tracking technologies. From what I have read about Clean Linking, they are simply links that are untagged. i.e. they do not contain any AffiliateID tags. Companies using this technology can track affiliate referrals without the need for a query string (based on the URL of the referring website). In other words: You provide the company with any domain name(s) that you will be linking to them from. When a user browses to their site, they check to see if they came from one of your domains. If so, they put a cookie on their machine to store this information. When this user makes their first enquiry through their system (on the same day or months later), they flag their account as being referred by you. This flag stays in their database forever and cannot be changed. The upside of clean linking is: You could be losing business without knowing it! Approximately 10-15% of users will try to circumvent your link as soon as it becomes apparent that you are trying to make money from their clicks, in the hope of getting a better deal by going direct to the source. This will deny you commission. The way users can check this is to hover over your link. If the link is not clean, your Affiliate ID tags will showin the status bar - thus indicating that you are tracking the user's click. If the AffiliateID is not incorporated correctly into a link, clicks will either be incorrectly tracked or take the user to a 404 Page Not Found error! "Supposedly"...search engines see clean links from relevant source as having a higher value than a 'dirty' affiliate link. The downside of clean linking: I don't know. I haven't read any yet. It seems it is rather new like the "Sell Direct" affiliate links being used by those that bought Spoken Network franchises a few months back. If the technology is there, then "why not" clean linking? It would sure beat what we have to go through now remembering all kinds of affiliate IDs and URLs, and then trying to cloak them effectively so the viewer can't see (find) them and hope a particular affiliate company still "reads" the cloaking so we get credit. Jim