Affiliate Software Documentation

Managing Invisilinks

What are Invisilinks?

Invisilinks are a marketing tool that allow you to set-up direct linking between your site and an affiliate's site without any unique affiliate ID. This makes the tracking technology "invisible" to a user that clicks on a link from the affiliate website.

Example Scenario

For example, you have an affiliate whose website domain is:

www.affiliatewebsite.com

Your affiliate program is currently installed on

http://www.yourstore.com/affiliates/

Normally, the affiliate would have to use a unique link from your program such as

http://www.yourstore.com/affiliates/username/

He would have to copy and paste that link at his website for any referrals he wants to send over to your site. This means that if he has a lot of web pages, and wants to send a lot of referral traffic to your site, he would have to copy and paste that affiliate link on every page that he wants to send traffic. This can be very tedious and turn off your affiliate.

Invisilinks Make It Easier

If you enable invisilinks, all the affiliate has to do is register his / her domain name with your affiliate program. Once you have approved his domain, any links from his site that goes to your main page will be tracked, even without any unique affiliate tracking link. That means he can just link to:

http://www.yourstore.com

Any time a user clicks on a link on his site that goes to your store, it will be tracked automatically.



Better Search Engine Optimization

With invisible links, you also have direct linking between your site and your affiliates. Normally, an affiliate link will redirect users to another page after clicking it, which may not rank as high for search engines compared to directly linking to your site. Search engines such as Google.com will see the links as direct links with no redirects, giving your site better ranking and optimization for search engine queries.


Activating Invisilinks

To use Invisilinks as one of your affiliate marketing tools, make sure to click on the Active /Inactive icon in the Marketing Tools > Affiliate Marketing page, under the Invisilinks button. This will activate the Invisilinks module as an affiliate marketing tool for you.

Adding Invisilinks

There are two ways of adding invisilinks. You can either add them yourself manually in the affiliate admin area, under Marketing > Affiliate Marketing > Invisilinks,or have your affiliate user add them themselves in the affiliate members area. If affiliate members add invisilinks, you will have to manually approve them. You will get an alert email letting you know that an affiliate has requested approval of his / her domain as an invisilink.

Activating Your Invisilink Setup

In order for affiliate links to work, you will have to add a short snippet of javascript code on your landing page in between the <head> and </head> tags. This is the page that users will be sent to when they link to your site.

The javascript code is:

<script>
var url = encodeURIComponent(document.referrer);
</script>
<script src="/AFFILIATES_FOLDER/link.php"></script>

where AFFILIATES_FOLDER is the folder where you installed the affiliate software. Replace that with your own affiliates folder.