Affiliate Links

Welcome to the heart of affiliate marketing. Affiliate links are an excellent way to monetize the credibility and the reach you’ve cultivated with your audience through recommendations. Earn commissions by leveraging the trust they place in you and your content.

You can utilize affiliate marketing links across different channels, e.g., websites, email newsletters, and social media posts. However, exercise caution, as certain sources may be prohibited depending on specific affiliate program terms.

Now, let’s immerse ourselves in the magic of affiliate links. Discover how they work, integrate them seamlessly with Advanced Ads, and unlock the best strategies to promote your affiliate marketing links effectively.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based strategy where online stores and services reward publishers for agreed-upon actions. Publishers, such as content partners, influencers, price comparison websites, and coupon portals, promote products using affiliate marketing links that offer recommendations to their audience and redirect visitors to an online store. The publisher earns a commission when a visitor completes a purchase traced back to the affiliate link.

There are four key participants in affiliate marketing:

• Advertisers (or merchants) who want to sell products or services.
• Affiliate marketing networks that connect publishers and advertisers.
• Publishers who promote the affiliate link on their channels.
• End customers who follow these links and make purchases.

The affiliate network plays a crucial role as an intermediary connecting merchants and publishers, offering valuable benefits to both. Publishers can conveniently find suitable advertisers and affiliate products for their campaigns on the network’s platform, access comprehensive reports, and receive timely payments for earnings across all advertisers.

While most advertisers are part of affiliate networks, some run independent affiliate programs outside such networks. In these cases, publishers must individually connect with each advertiser to participate.

Publishers have different relationships with their affiliate partners and products. The more involved they are in the products and the higher their expertise is in their industry, the better and more knowledgeable their content will be. This involvement leads to more successful promotion of affiliate links.

However, focusing solely on revenue and neglecting content relevance can undermine trust and engagement with the audience if the links are not genuinely helpful or aligned with their interests.

What are affiliate links?

An affiliate link seamlessly connects publishers, advertisers, and customers. Visitors are redirected from the publisher’s website to the online store when they click the link. The affiliate marketing link often contains a tracking code to monitor performance and determine partner commissions.

Affiliate links can take various forms, with specific extensions or cryptic/composite structures like company.com/?ref=123, visually indicating the affiliate number (e.g., 123).

In addition to tracking, affiliate marketing links frequently rely on cookies stored in the user’s browser. Publishers typically earn commissions within the specified cookie duration, e.g., 30 days.

Some links may include discount codes, while others solely identify the referring affiliate.

In the traditional approach to affiliate attribution, the affiliate receives credit without needing a link click. Businesses often achieve this by issuing limitless coupon codes to their partners.

Pros and cons of affiliate text links compared to other ad formats

Strictly speaking, other ad formats, like visual banners, are also linked with affiliate links. But in this tutorial, we’ll focus on the often underrated but highly converting text link format.

Pros

1. High relevance: Affiliate text links can be highly relevant to the content and context in which you place them. This results in better targeting and increased CTRs (click-through rates) compared to other online ad formats. Deep links (links to specific subpages rather than general home pages) ensure fine-tuning of the landing pages for your visitors. 
2. Trust: Affiliate text links are often seen as more authentic and trustworthy by users since they are integrated within the content and come from publishers’ recommendations rather than appearing as intrusive ads.
3. Ad blocker resistance: Using text links ensures that no ad blockers will suppress your ad and prevent you from losing money.
4. Flexible use on multiple channels: You can share affiliate marketing links also in email newsletters or social media.
5. Page speed: Text links cause almost no traffic, as they do not load unnecessary scripts or high-resolution banners from external resources that can negatively impact page speed.
6. Privacy: Unlike other advertising formats, you do not need visitors’ consent when using affiliate links. Therefore, you do not have the problem of missing out on potential revenue from those visitors who refuse to consent.

Cons

1. Reliance on audience engagement: The effectiveness of affiliate text links hinges on audience interaction and their willingness to act and click on the provided links. A lack of engagement or a mismatch between the affiliate offering and audience interests can hinder the success of this ad format.
2. Limited embedding choices: Text links function effectively within the content but are unsuitable for classic positions like the website header due to their inconspicuous nature.

Creating affiliate links with Advanced Ads

Now you have a general understanding of what affiliate marketing is and how affiliate links work. In the next section, I will describe how to create affiliate links and how you can integrate them into your website.

Generate or copy an affiliate link

After registering and making yourself familiar with the affiliate platform and its terms, we need to look at how to create an affiliate link associated with you, the publisher. Whether you go through an affiliate network or directly connect with a merchant affects the process little.

Typically, you will have access to prepared text links as HTML code. Some merchants like Amazon and Booking.com or advertising networks like Awin also provide dedicated link-builder tools. With these tools, you can specify a link to a relevant merchant subpage—a so-called deep link—to generate a converted link that contains your publisher tracking ID.

Embracing deep linking often results in higher conversion rates, as it caters to users’ specific intent. Unlike generic text links that merely direct users to a home page or category page, tailored deep links have greater effectiveness, offering users a more personalized and relevant experience.

Let’s consider this example: Instead of an Amazon affiliate link to a generic dog food page on their platform, we strategically place Amazon links in our article about dry dog food comparisons to specific high-quality food products for dogs. This approach aims to increase conversions.

Whichever type of text link you choose, at the end of this step, you should have an HTML code or a link target in your clipboard ready. In the next step, we will integrate this code into Advanced Ads.

Download and install Advanced Ads for free!

Create a new ad unit

First, you create a new ad. For using affiliate links, I recommend selecting the ad type “Plain text and code”. Then, give the ad a name. To establish a clear ad management, I advise choosing a descriptive title that helps you quickly identify the ad. I also recommend mentioning the advertising network or the merchant in the ad title. This way, you can promptly locate these ads using the filter function.

An example of such a title for an ad could be: “Amazon: NutriPaws Grain-Free Formula”.

Next, copy the link into the designated ad parameter field. Then, you can further customize the link, such as modifying the anchor text.

Best practices for creating anchor texts for affiliate marketing links that work

1. Use clear and descriptive anchor texts: Ensure that the text used for the link accurately represents the destination page or content it leads to. Avoid generic phrases like “click here” and use specific and compelling language instead, e.g., “Get the best food for your dog!”
2. Incorporate relevant keywords: Include keywords that are relevant to the linked content. These keywords improve search engine visibility and give readers context about what they can expect when clicking the link, e.g., “Get the best dry dog food for optimal nutrition and health benefits!”
3. Experiment with different anchor texts and track their performance: Monitor metrics such as CTR and conversion rates to determine which links are most successful. This data-driven approach helps you make informed decisions and improve the effectiveness of your text links. I’ll explain below how you can measure the performance of your text links using Advanced Ads.

Following these best practices will make your affiliate links clear, relevant, and engaging, ultimately enhancing the user experience and driving better results.

Add the correct link attributes

Google recommends adding link attributes to provide further information about the relationship between the publisher and the link target. For affiliate marketing links, the sponsored attribute is the one of your choice. You need to add this attribute manually to the ad code.

If you already enabled the Tracking add-on, you will find a dedicated checkbox in the Edit Ad settings to add the attribute automatically.

Enable link masking

Using link cloaking and masking the affiliate link with a cleaner URL can provide several benefits:

1. Enhanced user experience: Masking affiliate links with a cleaner URL improves user-friendliness and professionalism.
2. Increased CTRs: A cleaner URL is more clickable and trustworthy. It increases the likelihood of users clicking the link and visiting the destination page.

First, you need to activate the Tracking add-on to allow link masking for your ads. You can set up the structure of the masked links, e.g., example-page.com/linkout/42435, in Advanced Ads > Settings > Tracking > Advanced > Click-link base. 

You then head over to the tracking settings of each ad, where you will find a checkbox to enable link cloaking for that specific ad.

Overall, masking the affiliate link and using cloaking to promote links with a cleaner URL improves user experience, increases CTRs, and protects against commission theft. These advantages make it a worthwhile practice for affiliate marketers looking to maximize their earnings and maintain a professional online presence.

Publish the ad

After inserting and customizing the ad code, setting the correct link attributes, and optionally enabling tracking and link cloaking, you’re all set to publish your ad. Next, I’ll explain how you can effortlessly insert this ad into your content using Advanced Ads, either manually or automatically. But before we dive into that, there’s another time-saving feature I’d like to share with you.

Productivity tip: Duplicate ads

For those working with text links and directly inserting them into the content or creating product tables, it is common to require multiple such ads. These ads often only differ in their link destination and the ad name in the backend.

Advanced Ads Pro offers the Duplicate Ads feature that allows you to clone existing ads with just one click. You can then edit and customize these copies like any other ad. This feature is beneficial when creating numerous text links. It saves you a lot of time and prevents you from forgetting to adjust specific settings.

For instance, you have a well-performing text link promoting “Premium Dry Dog Food” and wish to create similar links for different dog food brands. Instead of recreating each link from scratch, you can duplicate the existing ad and adjust the destination to each brand’s product page.

Embedding affiliate links into your website

Advanced Ads provides various convenient options for seamlessly integrating affiliate links into your website.

Place text links manually

Affiliate links don’t stand out like traditional banners. They are most effective when seamlessly integrated within the body text or product tables using a shortcode. You can improve their visibility and engagement by strategically placing text links in such locations. This integration leads to higher click-through rates and maximizes your affiliate marketing opportunities.

To manually insert an affiliate link into a post or page, edit this content, and integrate the shortcode of the ad where you want the text link to appear. Alternatively, you can embed the ad unit using the Advanced Ads block.

After making the changes, save them and check the frontend to see if the text link appears as intended.

Edge Case: Shortcodes and Link Masking

You might run into this when inserting affiliate links using shortcodes directly into the text. If you have activated link cloaking for your affiliate marketing link and inserted its shortcode, as described above, it can result in unwanted line breaks.

Replace the div element with span to address this issue. To achieve this, add the inline parameter to the shortcode, preventing unwanted line breaks:

 

Use Placements

Placements are like handy slots thoughtfully integrated within your content or theme, enabling seamless and automatic injection of your affiliate ads in various locations without extra effort. These hassle-free slots offer a convenient way to adjust your ad setup without directly altering your content. You can effortlessly place ads, such as before and after your post, or even in the middle of your content.

Text links inserted between separate text blocks tend to convert less effectively than those integrated directly within a text block. However, I still recommend experimenting with an ad position between text blocks. If the ad includes an attractive anchor text and is well-targeted to users’ interests, it can still be successful.

Target text links and improve conversion rates

In affiliate marketing, optimizing ad performance and maximizing click-through and conversion rates heavily rely on effective ad targeting. With display and visitor conditions, Advanced Ads offers a robust tool to enhance ad targeting and maximize your revenue potential.

Display Conditions

Utilizing Display Conditions allows you to display specific ads based on factors like post category or contained keywords, guaranteeing their relevance and significantly enhancing their impact.

Suppose you have a website dedicated to pets. In this case, you can display an ad for dry dog food solely within posts containing the keyword “dog food” by using the post content condition. This targeting ensures that your ads seamlessly align with the content and cater to your audience’s interests more effectively.

Visitor Conditions

Additionally, Visitor Conditions enable you to target specific user groups. You can customize ads based on device type, referral URL, or location. For instance, if your website attracts international traffic, you can display specific ads only in certain countries. This level of targeting enables personalized ad experiences for different user segments, amplifying the impact of your affiliate marketing endeavors.

In this manner, after properly creating Amazon affiliate links, you can provide US website visitors with links to Amazon US’s pages showcasing your advertised dog food, while UK visitors will see a different ad pointing to the UK Amazon page to complete their order for the dog food there.

Show multiple text links at once

Do you remember the link units format from Google AdSense? Although Google has deprecated this ad type, you can build a similar and much more lucrative design for incorporating text links in just a few steps. This way, you could display a block of, for example, three text links sourced from a pool of many other text links targeted using display and visitor conditions. This intricate setup ensures the three displayed ads align well with the respective content.

Check this tutorial for a step-by-step guide on building your AdSense alternative using affiliate links.

Use affiliate links as ad blocker fallbacks

While ad blockers easily detect and suppress many modern ad scripts and banners, text links are immune to this threat. This trait opens up another profitable use case for affiliate links: their utilization as ad blocker fallbacks.

With Advanced Ads Pro, you gain access to this feature, which allows you to define a fallback ad for each placement. When Advanced Ads detects that a user has activated an ad blocker, the plugin automatically displays the ad blocker fallback instead of the regular ad that would show in that place.

This option allows you to monetize user traffic with activated ad blockers by embedding unblockable affiliate marketing links instead of modern, susceptible ad formats.

Track, analyze, and optimize affiliate link performance

The Advanced Ads Tracking add-on fully supports affiliate text links, granting comprehensive insights into your campaigns. You can choose from two local tracking methods or connect the ad performance tracking with Google Analytics.

How to track text links performance

To track the performance of affiliate links, you first need to activate the Tracking add-on. Afterward, go to Advanced Ads > Settings > Tracking to set the default tracking for impressions and clicks.

If you choose to track clicks and impressions for all ads by default, you don’t need to make any changes in the settings of individual ads.

However, you can customize this setting. For example, if you want to record only clicks but no impressions, make this individual setting for singular ad units as desired.

Once the ad is published, the tracking begins. You can monitor the performance in Advanced Ads > Statistics or set up an email report. If you have selected Google Analytics as your preferred method, you will find your tracking data in the corresponding Google Analytics property.

Check this tutorial to get more insights about Google Analytics reports. 

A/B testing and optimizing text link performance

Advanced Ads automatically calculates each ad’s CTR, allowing you to identify underperforming ads and optimize your ad setup effortlessly.

Text links offer great potential for A/B testing, as you can easily create and test new variants to compare different anchor texts or formattings and determine which performs better.

Suppose you intend to test different affiliate links at the same position, add multiple ads to a new ad group, and place the ad group shortcode in the text’s desired position.

But the benefits don’t stop there! Combining ad tracking with Google Analytics gives you access to more detailed information. For example, you can analyze the pages where users interacted with your ads and investigate their behavior. This integration offers valuable data to refine your advertising strategies, uncover hidden opportunities, and achieve exceptional results in your affiliate marketing efforts.

Compliance and disclosure for affiliate relationships in text links

Transparency regarding your financial relationships is vital. By incorporating an affiliate disclosure, you inform readers about your affiliations and potential commissions, meeting legal requirements and ethical obligations. This disclosure fosters trust and strengthens your relationship with readers, ensuring that credibility and honesty prevail.

This tutorial about affiliate disclosures provides practical advice on writing adequate disclosure notes. It covers key elements such as describing the relationship, explaining how affiliate links work, and how to comply with FTC guidelines.

Best practices when using affiliate links

Remember, the primary goal is to provide value to your audience while seamlessly incorporating text links that enhance their experience and align with their interests. Following these tips, you can effectively integrate text links into your content and drive engagement and conversions.

7 tips for the successful use of affiliate links

Success in affiliate marketing comes from effective alignment and targeting of your audience.

1. Clear and descriptive anchor texts: Ensure your anchor text accurately describes what the reader can expect when clicking the link. Avoid generic phrases like “click here” and use specific keywords related to the linked content instead.
2. Call-to-action language: Encourage readers to click on the text link using persuasive speech highlighting the benefits or value they will gain. For example, phrases like “Discover more,” “Learn how,” or “Get exclusive access” can entice readers to click.
3. Masked links: Using link masking or shortening techniques ensures that your links appear natural and trustworthy, increasing their appeal to users. Maintaining a clean and concise link structure can subtly guide your audience toward taking action.
4. Contextual placements: Regarding where to promote affiliate links, I’ll advise you to place your text links within relevant content that naturally flows with the topic. Avoid placing them randomly. Never place affiliate links that provide no value to your audience. Start reviewing products and services to create more context to place related affiliate links.
5. Balanced link density: Don’t overload your content with too many affiliate links. It can appear spammy and distract readers. Instead, strategically place relevant, high-value links that enhance user experience.
6. Compliance with Google: Add the “sponsored” attribute to your links. If you’re using the Advanced Ads Tracking add-on, enable the checkbox for automatic addition. Otherwise, manually include this attribute in the HTML code.
7. Tests: Experiment with variations of anchor texts, placements, and formattings to see which ones generate the best results. A/B testing can help you refine your approach and improve CTR.

Tools and plugins for managing text links in WordPress

Advanced Ads

The robust ad management plugin Advanced Ads empowers you to manage and optimize your affiliate links effortlessly. Enhance the plugin’s capabilities further with the All Access license, which lets you finely target your links using advanced conditions, utilize them as ad blocker fallbacks, and track their performance.

TablePress

TablePress is a versatile plugin that allows you to create and manage tables on your WordPress website. You can use these tables for product comparisons, info boxes, or pricing tables. Tables stand out in content and attract considerable attention, making them excellent for displaying affiliate links.

Since TablePress can execute shortcodes, you can easily insert your affiliate marketing links into tables using shortcodes, creating attractive promotional materials in just a few simple steps.

Pretty Links

Pretty Links is a popular plugin in affiliate marketing that allows you to shorten and manage URLs. It provides link cloaking and rudimentary click-tracking features, making it a free alternative to the Advanced Ads Tracking add-on. The really helpful features are reserved for the paid Pro version of Pretty Links.

Although Pretty Links is an excellent choice for beginners, it’s important to note that it has limitations compared to the extensive functionality of Advanced Ads. I recommend installing the Advanced Ads Tracking add-on for profound tracking, detailed analytics, and enhanced optimization capabilities instead of using an additional plugin.

Conclusion

You now have a solid grasp of how affiliate marketing operates and the significance of affiliate links. Moreover, I have demonstrated how Advanced Ads can assist you in establishing effective ad campaigns and enhancing your affiliate links’ performance through various features.

You can confidently embark on your affiliate marketing journey with this newfound knowledge and skills. Remember to continuously experiment, refine your strategies, and stay committed to providing value to your audience. I wish you the best of luck in all your affiliate marketing endeavors!

FAQ