Affiliate link cloaking is the process of disguising a link in order to conceal its destination URL. This results in shorter links and a cleaner appearance on your website. It’s a common marketing tactic that benefits online businesses and blogs wanting to grow.
The cloaked URL is shorter and more descriptive, allowing users to estimate where it would be taken if they clicked on it.
Here is what a regular affiliate link looks like:
http://www.affiliatedomain.com/url/aff_id=123&o=2&link_id=3
And, this is what a cloaked affiliate link looks like:
https://www.yourdomain.com/merchartname
So, why should you employ link cloaking on your website? Is it only because of the neater structure?
No! There is no much more you can do thanks to affiliate link cloaking software. So, let’s dive into it.
There are numerous reasons why link cloaking software may be beneficial.
1. Monitor and Manage Links
Using a link management system provides you with greater control, allowing you to view user data and use it to better your connecting strategy. You can easily track the performance of your hidden links with users on your site.
Suppose you observe that your audience rarely clicks on your fashion product links but frequently clicks on health product connections. In that case, it might be more beneficial to generate and promote more health-related content.
Using a link cloaker allows you to track your links and gain these vital insights.
2. Boost Click-Through Rates
Using clean links lends confidence to your business and assures visitors that it is safe to click on your material. This improves the appeal of your links and increases your click-through rate (CTR). The more your website visitors interact with it, the easier it is to go through the conversion funnel.
3. Protection of Commissions
If you’re not being too modest, the reason you’re in the affiliate industry in the first place is to make money. When your affiliate links are vulnerable to malware meant to replace your affiliate links with others in an attempt to steal your commissions, your profits are jeopardized.
If that isn’t enough, you can also lose commissions if a customer knows he is about to click on an affiliate link on your page and avoids it by clipping out the affiliate portion of the link and going directly to the primary site, say Amazon, to complete the purchase.
Cloaking your links is a good approach to avoid this. Link predators and by-passers would never know they were affiliate links this way.
4. Increase Brand Credibility
New visitors are looking for cues on your website that will reassure them that they can rely on your brand. If they don’t get enough reassurance, they’ll move on to another company that provides them with what they need to feel secure. Including clean, optimized links to your website boosts its legitimacy and gives customers more reasons to interact with your material.
Now that we’ve established why cloaking plugins are useful, let’s compare the best options on the market so you can select the best one for your WordPress website.
Link cloaking is the process of disguising a link in order to conceal its destination URL. This results in shorter links and a cleaner appearance on your website. It’s a common marketing tactic that benefits online businesses and blogs wanting to grow.
The cloaked URL is shorter and more descriptive, allowing users to estimate where it would be taken if they click on it.
What link cloaking software can you start using today?
Now that you understand the importance of link cloaking and how it can help you make your links prettier and more secure, let’s look at the software you can use for link cloaking.
Scaleo
At Scaleo, the link cloaking feature is coming up in a few months and we will update this post as soon as we roll this feature out in our next update.
Once Scaleo rolls out the option to cloak affiliate links, you will be able to create your default affiliate campaign links – shorter, easier to copy, paste and share on social media.
Scaleo will also allow you to have a deep insight into the performance of each link, giving you a better outlook on your affiliate efforts’ performance.
URL Shortify
URL Shortify allows you to shorten, disguise, manage, and share any links to your website. This includes various customization options, allowing you to customize your links exactly how you want.
You can hide and shorten URLs and utilize them in posts, pages, emails, and publications to drive legal traffic back to your site. URL Shortify includes analytics, allowing you to view the statistics of your URLs and measure their click-through rate.
This plugin is an excellent candidate for a link management system. You can adjust your destination URLs, search for certain links, change settings from your dashboard, hide affiliate links, and do a variety of other things.
Amazon Auto Links
We have already reported that Amazon has strict policies regarding hidden links. If you sell your products on Amazon, you should consider utilizing this plugin, this is a simple cloaker software powered by WordPress.
Amazon Auto Links generates Amazon affiliate links with your Amazon Associates ID. You can use these URLs to display one of your goods on a blog post without using a shortcode. Products can be shown in a slider part of your post or in the sidebar where visitors can scroll through.
If you don’t sell your products on Amazon, you might wish to skip this plugin. There aren’t many things that are particularly appealing or suitable for firms that aren’t Amazon Associates.
Pretty Links
Pretty Links is an all-around good link cloaking plugin. It’s simple to set up and has a slew of handy options for tracking and redirecting links.
It can, for example, track both the number of clicks per link and the number of unique clicks per link. This way, you’ll know not only how many times a link was clicked but also how many people clicked on that particular link.
You can also configure several types of redirections. With a 301 redirect, you may make your redirects permanent, or you can make them temporary with a 302 or 307 redirect.
One disadvantage of this plugin is that the “cloaked redirect” feature is not available in the free version. So, it’s a great URL cloaking tool but you might want to purchase the paid version. While you may still set up 301 redirects to successfully hide your affiliate links, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro version if you want to use the plugin’s native link cloaking capability.
Conclusion
Link cloaking is not a malicious practice and using a reputable link cloaking software will only make your affiliate marketing efforts easier. Indeed, some may argue that personalizing (defining) your links is a more honest approach to affiliate marketing than leaving them naked.
If you want to preserve your affiliate commissions, stay up to date on the industry’s top link cloakers and practices.
Changing your links to more appealing ones will almost certainly result in more clicks and affiliate money.
What does an affiliate URL look like?
Typical affiliate URL looks like this http://www.affiliatedomain.com/url/aff_id=123&o=2&link_id=3
How do I cloak a link without a plugin?
Cloaking a link without using a plugin can be achieved by manually editing your website’s HTML code. This involves creating an HTML anchor tag with a specific “href” attribute to hide the actual URL of the link.
What you need to know?
1. Cloaking a link without a plugin requires manually editing your website’s HTML code.
2. Use an HTML anchor tag with a specific “href” attribute to hide the actual URL of the link.
3. By cloaking the link, you can make it appear differently to users while still redirecting them to the intended destination.
What is the difference between link cloaking and link shortening?
While link shortening aims to create shorter and more user-friendly URLs, link cloaking is used to hide the original destination of a URL. Link cloaking and link shortening are two different techniques used to manipulate or modify URLs for various purposes.
Last Updated on January 2, 2024
