When your brand partners with the right creator, your product reaches an audience that’s already a great fit, boosting both brand awareness and sales. That’s the impact of affiliate marketing. The right tools help you support these relationships, attract clicks, attribute sales, and award commissions. Otherwise, you’ll battle inefficient processes, data gaps, and even a lack of consumer engagement.
Short links give your affiliate marketing a makeover, delivering a better experience for your affiliates, their audience, and your brand. Let’s explore the problems they solve and how you can build them into your strategy.
Affiliate marketing fundamentals
You’ve found a creator or influencer with the right network demographics and the right approach to content to recommend, review, and promote your product. But is affiliate marketing worth it? To move forward and start driving revenue for you and the creator, you need:
- A strategy to choose which products or services to pair with the creator and share key information about the product.
- A clear process for approving scripts and creative for affiliate marketing content.
- Standard guidelines and expectations for how creators will draw attention to and present your brand.
- Procedures and tools to track traffic and sales from each creator, which can include links and coupon codes.
Each element is an essential building block for a successful affiliate relationship. Without procedures to brief creators on your brand, they won’t promote your product well. Without the right creative process, influencers could publish off-brand content that doesn’t connect with your audience.
As with any marketing effort, measurement is key to understanding what’s working, proving the value of the channel and partnership, and making smarter decisions over time. And since affiliates receive revenue based on leads or purchases made, data isn’t just helpful for affiliate marketing—it’s essential.
Short links provide a branded touchpoint and real-time analytics, helping brands monitor affiliate relationships and track every click and sale to measure performance. They can also optimize affiliate relationships by identifying top-performing affiliates to inspire future partnerships and surfacing content that drives the best results. Tools like Bitly Links can simplify, streamline, and strengthen affiliate marketing management at every step.
Why long, complex affiliate URLs don’t measure up
Brands need to collect multiple pieces of information from every affiliate campaign—the influencer or creator involved, the campaign run, and the product promoted. Ideally, that information should be collected at the link level, so every click (and any resulting sale) can be traced directly to its affiliate source.
To collect this information, brands often default to using lengthy, complex URLs that display tracking information. Consumers encounter visual clutter and complexity that makes it harder to read and understand the links, which can limit click-through rates. This is where short link psychology comes into play—cleaner, shorter URLs appear more trustworthy and clickable to users. Plus, if a content creator wants to share a link by reading aloud or displaying it on-screen during a video, a long URL just doesn’t work.
To boost the shareability and engagement of an affiliate link, without losing visibility into performance, short links offer the best of both worlds.
4 link management mistakes (and solutions)
Brands that invest time and budget in affiliate marketing often have to manage multiple campaigns simultaneously, all while staying on top of other marketing initiatives. Here are some common pitfalls brands face when managing affiliate links—and how to fix them.
1. Staying too general with tracking
The more effort you put into measuring your marketing, the better you’ll understand your audience and optimize your efforts. If you use the same link for every campaign from one affiliate, or even across multiple affiliates, you might get some tracking data. But it won’t be detailed enough to tell you which affiliates and audiences are the best fit, which products are driving the most interest, and which content is driving clicks.
That’s why you need to get granular with tracking by creating individual links for every unique campaign. With short link tracking analytics, you gain in-depth details about which campaigns and content receive clicks and which affiliate relationships are driving the highest ROI.
2. Using a generic shortener
If a brand is starting out with affiliate marketing or doesn’t want to spend a ton of budget on link management, they might be tempted to choose a free or cheap solution to generically shorten affiliate links. However, selecting the wrong affiliate link shortener can create problems: They can be less reliable and secure than proven, well-known solutions for link shortening, and they also offer limited tracking options (if any). Plus, you typically can’t customize a generically shortened link to reflect your brand, limiting brand recognition and click-through rates.
Set aside some budget to choose a flexible shortening tool that follows short url best practices—offering options to customize your links for maximum brand awareness and tracking. Ideally, you can add a custom domain, select the back-half of your short links, and review performance over time. Bitly offers all of these features and is one of the most trusted solutions for link shortening.
3. Not having a central hub to stay organized
Marketing projects rarely live in a single, unified location. They’re spread across multiple tools, making it difficult to create a single source of truth, track down assets, and manage workflows efficiently. For affiliate relationships, this might mean a backlog of links and campaign details land across a mix of spreadsheets, email threads, and tools.
A better approach is to choose a single platform for generating, shortening, and tracking affiliate links. That way, with one login, you can check on or update ongoing campaigns, and you never have to wonder if you’ve lost track of a link or where to find it. For instance, within Bitly’s Connections Platform, you can review all of your campaigns in one place, make changes or redirect links, and track performance over time. The Bitly Analytics dashboard even lets you view a subset of campaigns at once, so you can compare performance across affiliates or channels and keep your links organized.
4. Failing to update links over time
Marketers are always on the move, keeping up with the changes in the market, their customers, and their products and services. So, affiliate links often need to change, too. But if your link management isn’t up to par, you could miss the mark on maintaining link integrity over time.
With the help of a link management platform, you should create a habit of regularly reviewing affiliate performance, updating broken or outdated links, and redirecting links as your needs change. The beauty of branded redirect links is that you can update where they point without changing every piece of content they appear in. Even on older affiliate content, it’s important to keep links current so audiences are always directed to the latest deals or products—you never know which click might lead to a long-term customer.
A step-by-step strategy for affiliate short links
Is it time to give your affiliate link management a new look? When you’re ready to put short links into action, here’s a straightforward checklist you can walk through to get started and make managing your short links a breeze.
1. Take stock of your current links.
Where and how are you currently managing URLs for creators and influencers? Is it a manual method like a spreadsheet? Are they spread across several locations? Start by bringing everything into one location or platform. As you do, you might already notice gaps, inconsistencies, and redundancies in how you’ve been promoting or tracking these efforts. That’s okay! This is all about making improvements and moving forward with an even better tool. Begin with a list of creators, campaigns, and corresponding links.
2. Choose the right tool.
The platform you use to manage and measure short links can make you more efficient or slow you down, and it can help or hinder your efforts to get more organized. Compare the best options for shortening and tracking links. The most important features to look for are:
- An all-in-one interface
- Link branding capabilities
- Real-time tracking
- Centralized performance data.
With a full-stack solution like Bitly, you get all of these features in a single platform, plus access to other features like QR Codes and mobile-friendly landing pages.
Cat food brand Smalls chose Bitly to create links for its influencer marketing efforts. Even with 10-20 campaigns running at once, Bitly saved the small startup team hours by making it easy to create multiple trackable short links at scale.
3. Make a plan and document processes
Even if you’ve already been using UTM parameters to track valuable information in your URLs, it’s still worth doing a reset. Revisit your current processes to ensure your team is aligned about what tracking elements to include in each link before they’re shortened. Create and document procedures for deciding short link back-halves, if applicable, and set up your custom domain if it’s possible within the platform and your current budget.
4. Start shortening.
With new processes in place, you’re ready to make the switch to short links. Decide how far back you’ll go to retroactively shorten existing links and ask creators to replace them where applicable. While some platforms don’t allow link replacements, creators can update affiliate links in written blog content or their link-in-bio. For any links you create moving forward, be sure to follow your new process and shorten them in your chosen platform—then, they’ll be ready to send to creators for inclusion in their next piece of content.
5. Monitor over time
As part of your regular reporting and marketing measurement, keep tabs on how each affiliate campaign is doing—with Bitly, you can do this straight from your analytics dashboard. Learning short url click tracking analytics will help you compare clicks (and details like location and referring channels) to the size of your creator’s audience to understand relative performance, and check for red flags or anomalies that can signal an issue with the link or content.
Partner with your affiliates to run A/B testing—comparing two options with subsets of the audience—on link placements, calls-to-action, and anchor text or buttons. When you notice a clear difference in performance between two options, learn from your audience’s behavior and adjust your next campaign to match their preferences.
As part of your ongoing maintenance, be sure to practice good short link hygiene for affiliates. If traffic drops off completely, troubleshoot short link issues by making sure the link isn’t broken or in error and redirect old affiliate links from out-of-date or out-of-stock offerings to new products.
Build long-lasting connections with short links
In strong affiliate partnerships, every click counts and is a chance for a customer to discover a new favorite product and for both the affiliate and the brand to increase revenue. Affiliates can help you make a strong first impression with friendly, branded short links that drive traffic and boost engagement. Behind the scenes, keep project management running smoothly with a solution that streamlines link shortening, management, and tracking.
Bitly gives you the tools to manage affiliate marketing with ease, offering the link management features you need on a platform designed for deeper audience connections. Take the next step to transform your affiliate marketing and get your short links in top shape by signing up for Bitly today.
