How Commissions Are Tracked

In order for an affiliate to get credit for their commissions there must be some tracking system in place. Affiliates are given special links to send traffic to that looks different from a regular url. These are sometimes called hoplinks. Hoplinks usually go through an affilate network so activity can be tracked. A normal website address looks like this: www.yoursite.com. An affiliate url looks something like this: www.yoursite.com/?affiliate=abc123. This allows for tracking but has some disadvantages such as in search engine marketing that I will get to later.

Some affiliates worry about theft of their commissions that they work hard to earn. There are two ways affiliates lose their commissions. First of all other affiliates can replace their own ids when making purchases. Secondly some people will see an affilate link and decide to chop off the affiliate id in their browser. To combat this to make sure they get the commission many affiliates are using link cloacking software. This hides the affiliate link and helps protect their commissions from being stolen.