LinkTrust Saves Best for Last

Michael Garrity — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 16:15:00 GMT

It's officially fall, and with the pumpkin spice lattes and the reappearance of our sweatshirts, also comes the end of LinkTrust’s Summer of Love, a summer-long series of Webinars.

However, LinkTrust, an affiliate management and tracking software provider, is ending the season and its series with a bang, announcing it is now offering the ability to utilize additional landing pages, hide click referrers, manage all traffic caps in a single report and clone creatives from existing campaigns. These fresh features were added to help both affiliate networks and merchants optimize their traffic and tighten affiliate security, in an effort to increase their profits.

Many of these additions were included with an eye on the mobile Web, as LinkTrust found that an increasing number of campaigns are being optimized for smartphones and other mobile devices.

For instance, now LinkTrust customers can create a rule that redirects traffic that contains specific device names in the user agent (e.g. “iPhone”) to a specific, optimized landing page. But these unique additional landing pages aren’t only for mobile, as customers can also make pages that display based on the user’s operating system, browser, non-mobile device or some other user agent attribute. These additional landing pages are a great way for LinkTrust clients to prepare and optimize their sites to be more useful for all of their traffic.

The ability to hide click referrers was put in place to prevent affiliate poaching. This can be done before the consumer traffic redirects to a merchant’s landing page so that the traffic is not interrupted. Any clicks and conversions that take place are still recorded by LinkTrust, but merchants won’t see the click’s referrer to see where they came from.

LinkTrust is also introducing Traffic Cap Reports to assure new advertisers, that want to work with an affiliate program, that they will get quality traffic. Additionally, traffic caps allow advertisers to vet a program’s traffic and protect the relationships between affiliates and their advertising partners. LinkTrust traffic caps are set on an individual affiliate/campaign basis, or simply across an entire campaign. Being able to monitor caps in a single location lets advertisers make informed decisions quicker by letting them see which caps have been met and the affiliate’s progress with the others.

For security purposes, LinkTrust is including new affiliate fraud enhancements to prevent the sale and transfer of affiliate accounts. Clients are now able to restrict affiliate login based on the users’ country or IP address.

The Affiliate Center is getting a bit of a makeover, as well, with a couple of new additions, such as the option to hide or show campaigns by affiliate group on the Request Offers page, the ability to re-agree to terms and conditions, a custom stylesheet for pop-out pages and a feature that lets clients add an “http://” to their website URL.

The Summer of Love finale also comes with the ability for affiliate managers to: update global pixels from within the Affiliate Center, filter by affiliate group on commission and performance reports and more. There is even an option for a new type of creative, called “File,” for any creative image package, PDF, zipped files, externally hosted data feeds and others.

Stay Informed About Affiliate Traffic Trends

Michael Garrity — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:30:00 GMT

It’s always nice to have an educated assumption about how well one’s investments are performing. This is why so many people take the time to follow the stock market and keep a keen eye on their money and how well (or not) their ventures are doing.

In the Web world, the same case can be made for affiliate marketing, and affiliate tracking and affiliate program software provider LinkTrust is addressing that very topic in the latest round of features released as a part of its Summer of Love updates.

Users will be able to access an affiliate trends report, allowing them to effortlessly determine which of their affiliate partners are seeing their traffic numbers grow and which of them are declining. These figures are determined using a proprietary algorithm and will forecast a LinkTrust customer’s affiliate trends for the current day, and informing them if they “should be concerned” about certain traffic levels.

Customers can now get mobile and email alerts that provide information about campaign requests, new task and task completed notifications, and tax document updates. Plus, the task manager has been updated to allow them to mass assign tasks, so that they can assign the same task to multiple users at once, and then monitor their progress as they all go about completing it.

Of, course, there is much more. LinkTrust is also releasing the User Agent Black & Grey list to help continue battling against fraud. This will let its customers block spider searches and screen scraper bots before they begin to affect their site statistics.

In addition, it’s offering a new custom sign up form that lets its customers automatically approve affiliate applications that let loyalty sites transform their users into affiliates, and then provide them with tracking links. This is meant to help loyalty, membership, and daily deals sites all maximize the potential of their suite of affiliate management features.

The third Summer of Love update also comes with an account traffic graph, an update of the external transaction modification API, the ability to search all of one’s affiliate partners by campaigns associated with a specific merchant, and other enhancements regarding user information, including merchant performance, merchant channels, new user rights, and response data.

'Net Features : summer of love

LinkTrust Saves Best for Last

Stay Informed About Affiliate Traffic Trends