Linkcodes
Also known as tracking links, are the main promotion tool provided to affiliates for sending traffic to your offers. Affiliates get their own unique linkcodes for the offers they promote so that users they send will be credited to their account if any conversions or Offer Goals occur. Each linkcode contains the information required for crediting the correct affiliate for the correct offer.
Encoded Linkcodes
Encoded linkcodes are the most common in Trackfinity. All of the information required by Trackfinity to tie an affiliate to a visitor is located in the string of characters at the end, which are base64-encoded. The last part of the sample URL is known as the Trackfinity Code, which has multiple uses in Trackfinity.
Unencoded Linkcodes
Un-encoded linkcodes display a period-delimited list of all information that would be in an encoded string within your URL. This is an alternate way to display affiliate linkcodes; the following example will break down what is displayed in an un-encoded linkcode.
| Position | Use | Explanation |
| 1 | Affiliate Username | The username of the affiliate who referred this visitor. |
| 2 | Commission ID | The numeric ID of the commission that the visitor's transaction will be paid out under (See Things to Remember). |
| 3 | Offer ID | The numeric ID of the Trackfinity offer your visitor is trying to visit |
| 4 | Landing Page ID | The numeric ID of the offer's landing page that your visitor will be redirected to (See Offers Admin for details). |
| 5 | Affiliate Campaign or SubID Set | The numeric id of the Campaign or SubID set associated with the affiliate (0 = the default SubID for that affiliate). |
| 6 | Creative ID | If the visitor followed a linkcode associated with a creative, this will represent the numeric ID of the creative the visitor saw. If no creative was used, this will default to 0. |
| 7 | Custom Affiliate Pass-Throughs | f you would like, you can pass back additional parameters from an external website. Trackfinity will then assign to it a numeric ID number. |
| 8 | SubAffiliate ID | The numeric ID of the SubAffiliate associated with this linkcode (if any). |
Shortname Linkcodes
Shortname linkcodes look very similar to un-encoded linkcodes, with one main difference. Instead of using ID number like an un-encoded linkcodes, this format uses the shortnames of the commission, offer, and landing page you have specified in the URL.
Tiny URL Linkcodes
To the average surfer a long tracking link or linkcode can be a deterrent. The Tiny URL format creates the smallest possible linkcode for your affiliates to present to surfers
Decoding Linkcodes
Encoded linkcodes can be decoded using base64 decoding, which uses ASCII characters and binary to encode/decode links. For the admins, we built a page that allows for creating/decoding tracking code.
Note
- All four linkcode formats are interchangeable.
- The non-encoded formats are security-smart. If an affiliate alters a linkcode so that they send traffic to an offer/landing page that can not be promoted, the affiliate will not get paid out on any transactions that result from that traffic.
- The non-encoded formats are NOT fool-proof. If an affiliate alters the linkcode so they are using a commission they don't belong to or using a landing page that doesn't belong to the offer, they will not get the desired payment or the visitor will not land on the right landing page in most cases.
Deep Linking
Affiliates can link to any other page on your offer website by appending a forward-slash and a relative path to the linkcode. For example, if your main offer URL is:
And your affiliate specifically wants to direct traffic to your "contact" page:
They could append "/contact/" to their tracking link to send them there:
Additionally affiliates can send additional parameters to be appended to the landing page URL. For example if they need to send "special_parameter=123" they can append it to their tracking link: