Every successful affiliate marketing program relies on creating and using affiliate links in the best, smartest ways possible. Various tips and tricks can help your affiliates generate more clicks—which means more sales for you.
So, how do you create and optimize affiliate links to support your strategy? We’ve put this guide together to show you. Discover how to use affiliate links, their benefits, and how to create and optimize them. We’ll also give you our top best practices that will help you drive traffic and increase sales.
What are affiliate links?
Affiliate links are similar to any other type of link, but with one extra element: a unique ID that allows you to track the link’s activity. In other words, whenever someone clicks on a link, you get a record of that click. If the click leads to a sale, you’ll be able to tell through analytics that the sale came from that specific link. That’s how you know when to give credit to a particular affiliate for the traffic or for the sale.
How affiliate links are used
Affiliate links are incredibly useful for tracking a variety of metrics. Here are some of the most common uses.
Attributing sales
Most often, you’ll provide your affiliates with unique affiliate links. This way, when that affiliate generates a sale through the link you’ve given them, you’ll know to give that person credit (and pay them a commission).
Tracking referrals
You can also use affiliate links to track referrals. When a customer purchases or signs up with your referral program, you provide them with a unique affiliate link. They can then share that link with their friends and family. If any of your customer’s referrals sign up for your service or make a purchase, you’ll know based on the activity of the unique referral link that you’ve provided to the initial customer. That gives you the ability to offer perks to the referrer.
Analyzing performance
No matter how you choose to use affiliate links—via affiliates, a customer referral program, or both—they give you the ability to analyze performance. Let’s say you give out a dozen links to different affiliates. Over time, you’ll collect data from those links that show how many times each has been clicked and how many sales each has generated. That lets you see who your top affiliates are so that you can refine your affiliate marketing efforts.
It works similarly with referrers. When you give out referral links, you’ll want to track demographic information and other metrics. This information can give you clues to help make your referral program even easier for referrers, and you’ll be able to see which segments of your target audience seem to be the most effective at generating referrals.
Benefits of using affiliate links
Whether you’re an online business or run a brick-and-mortar store, there are many great reasons why you should use affiliate links. Let’s examine some of the top benefits.
Greater brand reach and exposure
According to Proficient Market Insights, the affiliate marketing industry was valued at $15.77 billion in 2021, and by 2027, it’s expected to grow to $27.78 billion. It’s a huge industry with many opportunities for you to expand your brand’s reach and exposure.
Think of it this way: Without affiliate marketing, your reach extends to your own target audience, which you’re likely interacting with via social media, your website, and other channels. When you work with one affiliate, you’re effectively branching out to target two audiences: yours and theirs.
And when you work with dozens of affiliates? That’s dozens of targeted audiences, dramatically increasing your reach and exposure.
More sales and conversions
A survey by Digiday and Awin discovers that 80% of marketers view affiliate marketing as an important source of revenue. The main reason behind that? Most affiliate marketing programs are all about driving sales.
While some affiliate programs are designed to increase traffic and get more clicks, the goal for most is for the affiliate to market products on your behalf, drive potential buyers to your product pages, and maintain a high conversion rate to earn income on the commission payout.
Better performance tracking and analytics
As we showed you above, one of the top ways to use affiliate links is to track various metrics for marketing analytics. Unlike website analytics or social media analytics, affiliate marketing offers you a lot in the way of performance tracking. The beauty behind it is that each affiliate link has a unique identifier, which means you can easily track which links are performing the best.
From there, you can identify why particular links perform better than others. Is it the channels where your affiliates are sharing them? Or is it because one affiliate has a greater reach or target audience more suited to your offerings than others? You can find these things simply by looking at the metrics your links generate in a tool like Bitly Analytics.
More cost-effective advertising
Some types of digital marketing can cost a lot—for example, paying to develop a great website and storefront.
Not so with affiliate marketing. You’ll need to invest in an affiliate marketing platform to build a program and develop affiliate partnerships. That will usually only cost you a relatively low monthly fee. Beyond that, you’ll need to establish your affiliate commission rate, a cost most retailers build into product pricing.
There’s no need to go all out on content marketing expenses or other expensive efforts. You could find yourself working with content creators like bloggers, influencers, email marketing experts, and other ecommerce entrepreneurs, most of whom will create marketing materials that promote affiliate products according to their own content strategies.
How to create affiliate links
Creating affiliate links is easy. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide that will show you how to create affiliate links—and make them even better with Bitly.
- Choose an affiliate network like Rakuten, ShareASale, or ClickBank. There are lots out there to choose from, so be sure to do your homework and choose a platform that offers all the features you need.
- Within your affiliate site of choice, create an affiliate program complete with custom rules, information about the promotions you’re offering via affiliate links, commissions that affiliates will receive, and so on.
- Browse affiliates on the platform and add your favorites to your program.
- Via the affiliate dashboard, create unique affiliate links for each of your affiliates.
- Next, log in or sign up for a Bitly account and use Link Management to create custom vanity URLs (Note: Vanity URLs are only available to Basic plan users and above). This step replaces the “bit.ly” portion of a shortened link with your custom-branded domain.
- You can use Bitly to create custom back halves for your links, too. This way, customers will see something descriptive rather than the affiliate link’s unique ID string, making your links more attractive and clickable.
As you can see, once your affiliate program is set up, it only takes a few minutes to create and customize affiliate links. You don’t necessarily have to create custom domains or change the back halves of your links, but doing so gives your links a lot more credibility. Plus, people are more likely to click descriptive links that indicate where the link will take them.
Best practices for using affiliate links
Ready to start affiliate marketing your products or services? We have a few best practices to get you off to a great start. See below for our top affiliate marketing tips.
1. Embrace a multichannel approach
New affiliate marketers often focus on a single channel or simply choose affiliates who seem to have the most reach, regardless of the channels that those affiliates may use. But a multichannel or cross-channel approach is the smart approach because it helps you extend your reach across multiple avenues.
Place affiliate links on landing pages, and reach out to people who run review sites so you can put affiliate links in product reviews. Work with influencers on Instagram, TikTok, or elsewhere with popular social media posts. Send affiliate links to people who run email lists, podcast hosts, YouTube video creators, and more. Placing affiliate links with affiliates who create quality content will help you spread the word among many different audiences, expanding your reach dramatically.
2. Shorten your links
Link shorteners like Bitly are invaluable tools for affiliate marketers. Shortened links are a lot easier to share, but they also carry a lot more credibility. Many users are suspicious of links with long strings of seemingly nonsensical characters. A shortened link (especially one you’ve customized with your branding and back-half descriptors) lets people know where the link will take them.
To shorten a link with Bitly, you’ll first need to sign up for an account. Once you log in, select Create new then select Link. Paste your URL into the Destination field and select Create to finish the process. It’s that easy, and there are dozens of ways to use shortened links within your marketing strategies.
3. Use branded links
Don’t just shorten your links; part of optimization is to make sure they’re branded, too. Branded links have a lot more credibility than unbranded ones. They’ll signal to potential customers that they’re visiting a page related to your business, whereas generic affiliate links don’t indicate where the user will end up. These days, most users are savvy enough to avoid untrustworthy links (and the malware and other problems that sometimes come with them).
4. Balance link density
When you’re adding affiliate links to webpages or other types of links for SEO purposes, it’s best to avoid adding too many to each page. In general, between internal links, the sources you cite, and all the links you need to add to make sure the page functions properly, the recommended limit is around 100 total links.
Where affiliate links are concerned, it’s best to stick to just one or two per page. If you have too many affiliate links, your pages could get penalized in search rankings when Google’s crawler analyzes your site. Or worse, if your page has enough links that Google deems it spammy, your pages may not get indexed at all.
5. Disclose affiliate links
Speaking of spam, many users view affiliate links or links with suspicious-seeming strings of random characters as either potential spam or an outright security threat. That’s why it’s always a good idea to disclose affiliate links.
Doing so signals potential customers that you’re not trying to hide anything and that everything you do is above board. A few potential customers will even go so far as to make sure they use the affiliate link they’ve been provided as a way to make sure the affiliate gets paid for content that the customer found particularly valuable.
6. Regularly monitor and analyze data
All marketing campaigns should be regularly monitored and analyzed. Affiliate marketing is no different. In fact, regularly examining your analytics is the only way to improve the efficacy of your marketing efforts.
When it comes to marketing with affiliate partners, pay special attention to the number of clicks and affiliate sales each link generates and the demographics behind those clicks and sales. You’ll learn which affiliates are most effective at promoting your product. You’ll also learn a lot about each affiliate’s target audience—which can be helpful if you want to branch out to new audiences or expand business among particular demographics.
Create and manage all of your affiliate links with Bitly
Ready to level up your affiliate marketing efforts? Bitly gives you the tools you need to create enticing, easily trackable affiliate links. Use Bitly to add custom branding and descriptive keywords to your links, and rely on Bitly’s analytics to track clicks and other crucial metrics. Find the solution that works for your business and get started here.