You often hear talk of link cloaking in the internet marketing business, and most times its also somehow linked to something called link tracking, or ad tracking -- Which one should you care about in your online business?
The Warrior Forum - link cloaking / avoiding affiliate hijacking::
link cloaking / avoiding affiliate hijacking, New Topic Topic Locked . For security reasons, and to ensure proper tracking of your referrals,
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To answer that, we need to go into a little bit of detail about how cloaking is handled in the background -- and dont fret, this is going to stay at a high level -- Ill resist the tempation to get all techy with you!
When you give someone a cloaked link to click on, its going to lead back to YOUR web site -- it doesnt go straight to the site of the product youre promoting. It leads to your site, its automatically looked up in a list, and the person who clicked is redirected to the product site using your affiliate link.
Since the click takes the person to YOUR site first, the cloaking software takes the opportunity to save some information, such as the date and time of the click, where the user came from, end even the IP address of the user.
QwikURL.com Make a shorter URL, free redirection, cloak affiliate ::
Make a shorter url, free redirection, cloak affiliate links, and track your ads for super profits. Track ad and affiliate links aith statistics.
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Mike Steup's Affiliate Software Pro::
With Affiliate Software Pro, the same affiliate links look like this: .. Few people normally bother to use these tracking IDs as they are a bit "techie"
http://www.affiliatesoftwarepro.com/HOME |
By saving that information in a file you can look at, its easy to see what links are being clicked on.
So the process of cloaking a link, also means the link can be tracked -- as long as youre using software that takes that into account. There are some methods of cloaking a link that dont track the clicks, and I recommend you stay away from those. Since cloaking and tracking can easily be accomplished at the same time, it makes sense to use one tool that does them both.
So, is there any difference between a link thats redirected and a link thats cloaked?
Theyre basically the same thing -- a cloaked link will redirect the person who clicked it to the site of your choice. They see, and click on, a link that looks very normal, but it can be a long gnarly-looking link on the back-end that theyre redirected to.
And that brings up another reason to use a redirect, or a cloaked link. Sometimes, even if youre not using an affiliate link, you end up with a link thats just too long for emails without wrapping, or that just looks ugly. In those cases a cloaked link will get the person to the correct page or site, but youll use a nice compact link to do the job.
Most people have seen links using the TinyURL web site -- those are cloaked links that redirect the user to a different web site. While the links are nice and short -- and disguise the destination of the link -- the downside to using a service like that is that you dont control the redirect URL -- once youve sent out the link, you have to live with it.
Using a self-hosted solution for handling your cloaking/redirecting and tracking is usually a much better option for your online marketing business.
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Link Cloaking And Link Tracking - Are They The Same?