Tracker vs. Affiliate Link Plugin (7)
What's or is there any purpose of using an affiliate link plugin i.e. Thirsty Affiliates once we have a tracker if any?
Not knocking the affiliate plugins per say as I've used them in the past over something like bitly, but wondering if there's any real purpose?
Originally Posted by mcstacks
The main question here is: What are you trying to achieve here? i.e. What features/functions are you looking for?
Amy
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I had a quick look at Thirsty Affiliate and I would say it serves a different purpose than the trackers we use, such as
As Amy mentioned above, depends on what you want to achieve, there are so many plugins out there and some might have the functionality you are after, if thats something out of the ordinary 
Originally Posted by vortex
The only benefit I can think of using both together, in the case of email campaigns is possibly needing to switch out a tracker link where the same tracking link would be used in an autoresponder series, without having to switch out the tracker links in autoresponder emails, and just change in once place in the aff link plugin. That's about the only benefit I see.
Email Follow-up >> AFF Plugin Link >> Tracking Link
This would be of use in the case of switching trackers down the line, and would only have to change the link in one place, instead of changing multiple links in anautoresponder campaign. Overkill thinking most likely here, probably not worth it. Would slow things down too with the setup.
As far as using one or the other, tracker wins obviously. Maybe I'm questioning the existence of affiliate link plugins now that I have a much more high-level tracker...and just realizing all this as an a-ha moment.
Originally Posted by matuloo
As Amy mentioned above, depends on what you want to achieve, there are so many plugins out there and some might have the functionality you are after, if thats something out of the ordinary
Originally Posted by mcstacks
Email Follow-up >> AFF Plugin Link >> Tracking Link
This would be of use in the case of switching trackers down the line, and would only have to change the link in one place, instead of changing multiple links in anautoresponder campaign. Overkill thinking most likely here, probably not worth it. Would slow things down too with the setup.
As far as using one or the other, tracker wins obviously. Maybe I'm questioning the existence of affiliate link plugins now that I have a much more high-level tracker...and just realizing all this as an a-ha moment.
You could solve this with a simple script or a piece of php code... let's say you would setup some kind of default "routing" domain that you would link to from your emails. Something like defaultdomain.com/index.php And what the php script would do, would be to grab any possible tokens from the url and then redirect the visit to a tracking link with all the tokens added. Once you need to change the tracker or tracking links, you would simply do that in the php file. This is something any basic coder should be able to create for you.
IMO - These affiliate plugins are built around blogger's work/marketing flows.
Flows generally involving multiple organic traffic sources, email marketing, and perhaps some ppc and retargeting.
Imagine a scenario:
you have a blog where you review hundreds of products across hundreds or thousands of pages.
You will definitely want to use a plugin that enables you to manage / import your links or easily add links to articles, automatically or manually.
(you could be using a plugin like datafeedr to import offer links from hundreds of networks into your WP)
Can you imagine yourself working with a tracker to track hundreds of offers on your site?
- Add your landing pages
- Define your "click urls" click/1, click/2, click/3....etc... etc... click/100 - each with its destination.
- pray that you didn't forget anything
Then trying to make sense of what's really going on and try to optimize such "campaign".
Now, imagine you're doing some good SEO, and you've got your google analytics, facebook, taboola, bing and other pixels being filled with quality audience. You want to tap into some retargeting campaigns and target only users that have clicked on the offer links, but did not convert.
(GTM can help out in this case)
So you've got a mix of traffic sources delivering organic traffic.
And now you want to leverage your organic traffic high intent audience to upsell, or offer special discounts - how do you actually manage such campaign with a traditional tracker?
And to make matter worse, you've got your email campaigns that sometimes redirect users to your site, and sometimes directly to your offers.
How do you actually make sure you've got everything under one roof?
Example: you've run a retargeting campaign on taboola, and acquired some leads on a quiz, and you're emailing the leads with some offers.
How do you send the conversion back to taboola postback so you know how much your campaign is actually making you?
Tracker or Link plugins serve very different purposes - but they can work together when you're not "tied" to the tracker's "click url" (i.e. /click/1 /click/2).
https://yourwplink.foo/goto/brand?url=https://productpage.foo/category/productxyz.html&utm_source=activecampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sequence
cheers
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