10+ TOP Smartlink Affiliate Networks [2024]
Though relatively simple, smart links have the power to help you get much more out of your affiliate marketing efforts. In this article, we'll talk about what a SmartLink is, how it works, and how you can utilize it to make your affiliate marketing campaigns more manageable and profitable.
What Are Smart Links
Smart links are pretty new, and not everyone knows about them. They are a result of the surge of data science and improvement algorithms. So an introduction is in order before we talk about their uses and tips.
Smart links are a powerful tool for affiliate marketers and an upgrade to regular links. Same as any other links, they are URLs you can share. However, they offer further customization and tracking features. Smart links save affiliate marketers a lot of work and make their lives easier. Instead of using several offer links in different campaigns, affiliates can create a single Smartlink and use it in all of their campaigns.
SmartLinks select an offer for each user who follows the affiliate referral link individually. Advertisements are also set automatically based on the affiliate links. SmartLinks, in other words, are affiliate links that do not refer to one specific product.
What Do They Look Like
Regular links look ugly: filled with random numbers and letters and signs. It's impossible to remember an ordinary URL. SmartLinks, however, can be customized to include actual words. They are much shorter and more memorizable.
A URL like smart links is much more attractive to users. To make the deal sweeter, people find it easier to trust smart links since they feel more confident clicking on branded links.
SmartLink Affiliate Networks
To set up your SmartLink, you need to sign up for an affiliate network that provides smart links. Depending on the affiliate network you choose, the process of setting up smart links is straightforward.
You must agree to the rules concerning illegal traffic since those will result in non-payment. Choosing the type of traffic is another step while setting up a SmartLink: some popular verticals are Mainstream, Push, or Adult. Some networks may provide additional options. You can also use sub ids to track your link performance from various placements and use these in your tracker.
How do SmartLinks Work
To best use something, you need to know how it works. "Smart" isn't a word we're conservative with these days, and almost anything has an intelligent counterpart. But what makes smart links so bright?
They recognize where your traffic is coming from and redirect it accordingly to show each user the best offer. It does so based on GEO, operating system, device type, carrier, browser, etc. Hence you can monetize all of your traffic effortlessly and much more efficiently.
The purpose behind using SmartLinks is to increase income by bringing each visitor to the offer that has statistically made the most significant impact and is most likely to convert. Therefore with smartlinks, you can get the maximum revenue, something you wouldn't get with regular links.
Smartlinks make this redirecting possible using powerful algorithms that the best SmartLinks affiliate networks provide. The algorithm will sort the traffic and find the best suiting option based on information asked of the affiliate when setting up their SmartLink, which, as we mentioned, consists of the vertical (adult or mainstream), GEO, operating system, and device type of the users.
- If the conditions you've set are satisfied by the user who clicks on your SmartLink, they will be redirected to the defined destination.
- If no destination URL meets the users' GEO, device, and other conditions you've set, they'll be redirected to the default URL.
- If the user matches the conditions for multiple of your offers, they'll be redirected to the URL with the highest rank.
Why Use SmartLinks
What happens to traffic you can't send to your offer? It wouldn't be uncommon to get users clicking on a URL meant for one GEO from another. This traffic is wasted, which is a shame. You could set up filters in your trackers to redirect this traffic to another offer. But doing this for all traffic sources would be too much of a hassle. If you're having trouble monetizing a portion of your traffic, smartlinks may be the answer for you.
You can set up a SmartLink to make your life easier by automatically finding the best offer for your traffic source. In this way, you'll monetize even traffic that isn't the best match for your targeting and profit from it.
Smart links are also substantially more accessible and faster to set up than a standard website. With no coding or design experience, you can create a professional-looking landing page in minutes.
Why NOT Use Smartlinks
You might be thinking, "This is great! But shouldn't everyone be replacing their old links with smartlinks?"
Great question. While smartlinks make affiliate marketing easier and make the best use of traffic, they have disadvantages. You will immediately notice that most offers and landing pages that you can find using a SmartLink have a lower payout than if you'd run them directly. Because you have no hold over how your Smartlink optimizes your traffic, monitoring the quality of traffic you send is difficult. As a result of this, affiliate networks have reduced payouts.
Ensuring that every landing page and offer adheres to most traffic sources' ad quality criteria is challenging. That brings us to one of the main disadvantages of smartlinks. It can be tricky getting a SmartLink campaign to be approved. As SmartLinks generate the most EPC, a lot of the landing page and offer combos within the SmartLink turn out to be aggressive.
Therefore veteran affiliate marketers only use smartlinks in some instances.
The Best Way to Make Use of SmartLinks
As you've probably guessed, the typical way affiliate marketers use smartlinks is to redirect remnant traffic. Meaning you can even make money off of unintended traffic from other countries or devices.
For example, if you're promoting a mobile app only available on US iPhones, traffic from Android or desktop will be wasted if sent to your introductory offer. By using smartlinks, you can make sure even those users find an offer relative to their criteria, no matter which GEO or device they're using.
An immediate benefit is that you don't need very specific traffic to result in a conversion. This brings us to the second way you can use smartlinks; testing and finding opportunities.
You can easily buy RON (Run of Network) traffic and let smartlinks do their magic. Send all of that traffic directly to a SmartLink affiliate campaign. This will allow you to discover new combinations of KPIs that are converting. After obtaining data from running the Smartlink, proceed with your optimizations.
Where Should You Share a SmartLink
Smartlinks can easily replace any referral link you have for all your offers. Therefore you can proceed as you normally would with them. Thanks to their shorter length and more legible appearance, smartlinks can be shared in several places.
Email Newsletter
There's not a single digital marketer that doesn't know the value of email marketing. Newsletters are a compelling affiliate tool through which you have access to users who willingly took a step forward just to hear your latest news.
Emails are even more engaging and direct than social media posts, which can get lost in the busy feeds. However, they should be reserved for the highest quality content since users are quick to unsubscribe to spam newsletters. Use your SmartLink to measure how much interest your subscribers show in—which one of—your offers.
YouTube Description
YouTube, as you know, is an excellent place for promoting affiliate programs. Video descriptions have traditionally been where YouTubers promoted programs related to that specific content.
More importantly, the caption under videos plays a crucial part in the youtube algorithm. Well-written captions will help you reach more audiences as you will rank higher in search rankings.
Social Media Posts
Smartlinks help you find out which offers resonate better with your followers. You don't even need to advertise anything directly. By sharing your SmartLink URL on every post, you can redirect them to some content that the algorithm finds.
Website
Smartlinks are embeddable and can be turned into widgets you can set up on your website. Chances are, the affiliate network you sign up for already has creatives and widgets for you to choose from.
To showcase your SmartLink and its widget on your website, you must implement its HTML code.
Data and Optimization — Key Values of SmartLinks for Affiliate Marketers
Affiliates who have their SmartLink set up would do well to wrap every link they share in it. Doing so will ensure they access the vast amount of data that SmartLink affiliate networks provide with their smart links. Affiliates can maintain consistency with their offer, measure visits, and click-throughs, learn more about their converting traffic, and keep everything they're promoting organized.
You can see how well your offers are doing and access the said data through your affiliate network. Once your links start getting lots of traffic, you can analyze your performance by utilizing data provided by your SmartLink. We always like to emphasize how important optimization is in the affiliate market. Among the standard data you can extract from your affiliate network are:
- CTR: click-through rate shows the percentage of clicks on your link against the number of visits.
- Visits: number of real people that have visited your landing page or product through your SmartLink. Networks won't count bots as genuine visits.
- Location: affiliates can see the cities or countries where their visitors are located.
- Traffic source: the traffic source for your link.
- Profit: how much money you've made from your SmartLink.
Technically, you have access to this data to optimize your campaign with regular links. But a SmartLink allows you to measure your performance more comprehensively and better than an ordinary URL.
Ultimately, data is only beneficial if you can translate it into action. As an affiliate marketer, you are constantly trying to figure out which channels lead to conversions. In marketing, attribution, also known as multi-touch attribution, identifies a set of user actions that contribute to the desired outcome.
Without a clear picture of which marketing activities are yielding outcomes, your campaigns will rapidly become complicated and costly. It is nearly impossible to build a targeted campaign or grasp why certain efforts are successful if you're lacking attribution data.
Conclusion
Smartlinks are easy to set up. They will help you monetize your traffic as no other tool will. They're all almost essential for Ron of Network traffic. But the value of any marketing asset is closely related to the quality of the network. SmartLink's algorithm, which is the very thing that differentiates it from regular links, is dependent on the network.
This article introduced more than 10 SmartLink affiliate networks that are on the top of their game in 2022. Through these, you are sure to access their vast database of offers and landers, along with the data they provide you for your optimization efforts.
