Introduction

Deep links are links that direct your site's visitors to a specific page URL on an advertiser's site rather than to the advertiser's homepage. They are links that go deeper into the site. These links direct the visitor to more specific information that is more likely to help them decide to purchase or generate a lead or other desired action that results in a commission for you.

You can shorten deep links for use in social media and other postings using a shortener such as bit.ly or others.

Linking to an Advertiser’s Page

Before you create deep links, please be aware that not all advertisers allow this practice. You can confirm that they do by:

1. Checking their Features and Services page.
2. Viewing our advertisers enabled for deep linking.

You should see your 11-digit encrypted ID or affiliate ID, not your SID, in the link as shown in this example after id=:

http://click.linksynergy.com/deeplink?id=xxxxxxxxx&mid=2385&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.merchant.com%2Fdeals.htm. 

You can think of your affiliate ID as the tracking code, and your SID as your account number in our network.

Your links should start tracking to the correct page almost immediately.

Reporting

Deep link activity will appear in the “link type” as deep links in reporting. Deep links do not have unique link ID numbers, thus when running a report based on link ID, deep links will appear with an ID value of “1”.

To view deep links, navigate to Reports then Performance Reports then Link Type Report, and filter for Link Type = Deep Links. You can also add more columns to show attributes such as Link ID and others. Running a Link Type report will only show click and sales data. It will not show each link itself.

The publisher dashboard does not have a function to store deep link history. We recommend that publishers create their own repositories. Publishers can also use the u1 parameter to ID individual deep links, assuming this this parameter is not being used for any other values.

Link Code and Linking

You can manually create a deep link for an advertiser who is not enabled for deep linking. The link will function, but it will redirect to the advertiser's home page and not the targeted landing page.
Deep links can be shortened using third-party sites such as bit.ly.

You can include a deep link in an email.

Tracking and the u1 Parameter

u1 is an optional parameter or value that is used to track the activity level for each individual member, organization, or sub-site via the member ID field. This is typically used by Signature Publishers to track sub-sites and members.

If you create a deep link to an advertiser's page, but the visitor ends up purchasing something from a different page, you will still be credited with the sale, provided that the purchased product is eligible for a commission based on your offer with the advertiser.

Tracking links, including deep links, redirect links to the desired landing page and drop a tracking cookie. However, the offer from the advertiser defines which products are eligible for commission. A deep link does not restrict a publisher’s ability to earn commission on products. A publisher will earn a commission on any product purchased that is part of the advertiser’s affiliate program.