Earlier this week, I had a member send me a private message asking about direct linking their campaign without using a tracker because their free monthly tracking credits were about to be gone and they did not have the budget to pay for the tracker and run the campaign.
I am sure this scenario comes up often with people that are new to affiliate marketing. I remember when I worked for
PeerFly having publishers ask me all the time about how to direct link without using a tracker.
There are many benefits to using a tracking tool, but it some cases it does make sense to just direct link. So, in this guide I am going to show you how to direct link without a tracker and talk about the benefits of both.
| Tracker Benefits | Direct Linking Benefits |
|---|
| Easily manage all of your campaigns in one place. | Lower clickloss. |
| Easily split test offers. | Decrease technical knowledge required. |
| Easily split test landing pages. | |
| Privacy (data isn't necessarily open to networks). | |
The point of a tracking tool is to make managing your affiliate marketing campaigns easier. You can see campaigns across multiple
traffic sources using multiple
affiliate networks and as many affiliate offers and landing pages as you want. Managing those campaigns without a tracker is possible, but it is much more time consuming. It would also require some technical/programming skills in most cases.
One benefit of direct linking without a tracker though is that you will see a decrease in clicklos (you're avoiding the extra redirect caused by the tracker) and setting up a direct linked campaign also requires a bit less technical knowledge since you don't need to know how to use the tracker.
So, how can you manage a campaign direct linked without a tracker?
Here is an example campaign I am running right now with
Monetizer and
Evadav pops
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I am not using a tracker at all with this campaign. I am direct linking my Monetizer link on Evadav and doing all the optimizations using the Evadav statistics page and the Monetizer league statistics for my link.
As you can see from the top row of my Evadav stats, I am actually profitable today so far based on the optimizations I was able to make yesterday ($12.35 profit so far with 84.52% ROI).
So, how did I do it?
One important thing if you are going to direct link without using a tracker is to make sure your
traffic source and/or affiliate network provides great reporting. Without a tracker, you are going to depend on their reports to do your optimizations. The reason I decided to do this with Monetizer and Evadav is because they do both have great reports.
For example, let's say I wanted to see the top Sources right now on Evadav and potentially blacklist Sources that aren't performing. This is really easy because I setup my Evadav postback on Monetizer so all my stats are available right inside of Evadav:
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IMPORTANT: if you are going to direct link and use your traffic source for reporting, you will need to use a traffic source that supplies a postback and shows you the conversion date in their reports. Most traffic sources do this now
Real quick, let's take a look at how I setup this postback using Evadav and Monetizer as an example.
Setup Monetizer and Evadav to do direct link tracking
First, get the postback URL from Evadav. This is the same for everyone so you can just copy it:
But, it's available on the create campaign page as well:
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You're then going to create a new League in Monetizer. You will want to create a new League for any new traffic source you are going to setup to do a direct link. This is because each League has it's own postback URL.
Go to your Leagues page on Monetizer (
https://app.monetizer.com/leagues) and then click on the
+ New League button. Name your League after your traffic source (
Evadav) so it's easy to find and remember. Click
Create League.
Now, click
Manage Leagues and you should see a list of all your Leagues. I have quite a few
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You will need to add your
Evadav Postback URL. We copied the original one from Evadav, but you need to replace the clickid and payout variables:
this is the updated postback with the
{clickID} and
{amount} that Monetizer uses. Copy/paste that into the Postback URL box. Monetizer saves this in the background so there's no need to click a save button or anything. You're all set!
The last step is to create your Monetizer URL. I'm assuming at this point you know what you want to promote from Monetizer. If not, you can use this guide to learn how to research offers:
afflift.com
Click
Create Link on Monetizer and then fill in the form similar to how I did here:
View attachment 18799
Here is a breakdown of the steps:
1. Where you go to create your link
2. Select the correct vertical for the offers you want to rotate. For less aggressive LPs/offers, choose Mainstream.
3. This is
SUPER IMPORTANT. Make sure you select
Evadav or whatever League you have setup for the traffic source you are using! Your tracking will not work if you choose the wrong League and you cannot change it afterward so you will need to just create a new link.
4/5. I name my campaign and link the same thing and use the same campaign name as I use on the traffic source so there's no confusion.
6. Make sure to check the box to do the bounce/popunder to self.
7. This is where you add your click and tracking variables. The Click ID is determined by the traffic source. Evadav uses {CLICKID} so that's why I put that there. You can add 5 different keywords you want to track. These also come fro your traffic source. Evadav has sources and zones so I added those. You can then see the breakdown of your stats in your League stats (will show below).
8. Offer Targeting is optional, but this is where you can create a whitelist or blacklist of offers from Monetizer you want to rotate. This is done after optimization in most cases.
Click the button to create your link and then add that link as your Campaign URL in your traffic source and you're all set!
If you have done everything correctly, you should start to see clicks in your Monetizer League stats once you start getting traffic from your traffic source. You should also see any conversions show up in your traffic source reports as well as Monetizer.
Here are the keywords reports for my League (Sources and Zones we setup in our link above):
View attachment 18800
and the one report I really need to focus on today, my offers:
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It looks like I can probably double my ROI with just a few optimizations
So, that's how it's done! No tracker involved. Just direct linking my traffic source and my affiliate network. Monetizer is an exceptional affiliate network for doing this because they give you the ability to rotate the offers and whitelist/blacklist specific offers. This is also why they're one of my favorite smartlinks.
Let me know if you have any questions
