The approach described below gives you the benefit of managing all of your affiliate links in one place in your WordPress site. Your links will also be more human readable which makes them more brandable, easier to share, and less intimidating.
Say goodbye to time wasted finguring out what all your affiliate links are and how they are performing!
These steps show you how to create a trackable link like http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=601672&U=123456&M=49337&urllink= and place it on a WordPress site such as https://streetphotography.blog.
In real life, replace http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=601672&U=123456&M=49337&urllink= with your affiliate marketing link and replace https://streetphotography.blog with your site.
Create a 307 redirection link with the Target URL http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=601672&U=123456&M=49337&urllink= and Pretty Link share/example.
Navigate to Insights > Settings > Publisher. Click on the Add Another Link Path button.
Enter /share/ for the Path. Enter affiliate-share for the Label.
Now, any affiliate link with the path /share/ in it will be tracked and redirected.
Below is an example affiliate pretty link that would go in your post or page.
Example <a href="https://streetphotography.blog/share/example">ShareASale</a> link.See the live demo of this link.
Once there's activity on the affiliate link, you can view the stats in WordPress under Insights > Reports > Publishers.
You can see the full report in Google Analytics under Behavior > Events > Top Events > outbund-ink-affiiate-share.
If you're managing a lot of links, you can customise the MonsterInsights Affiliate path settings to be more intuitive, more specific, and add more granularity to your tracking in the full report.
Here are some examples:
| Path | Label |
|---|---|
| /hotel/ | aff-hotel |
| /air/ | aff-air |
| /train/ | aff-train |
Remember, once you add the path to your MonsterInsights settings, you'll need to:
- Insert that path into the corresponding Pretty Link.
- Add the full Pretty Link into your posts and pages.
You don't need to update your paths in MonsterInsights every time you want to add a new hotel link, for example. You'll only need to add a new path if you want to add another affiliate category.
We have a great video on affiliate links if you need it as a reference or want to learn more.