Smartlinks
Updated over a week ago
Time to read: 8 min.
The article covers the following topics:
⚠️ The Smartlinks feature is available only for certain plans. Contact your Affise account manager to get the feature.
What is Smartlink?
The Smartlink is a monetization tool that allows your affiliates to get only one link to all the offers. Using the technology of machine learning, it automatically selects the offers by several parameters.
In Affise Smartlink URL looks like:
http(s)://<YOUR_DOMAIN>/sl?id=<SMARTLINKS'_SELECTED_CATEGORY_ID*>&pid=<AFFILIATE_ID>Once the user clicks the smartlink, he will be automatically redirected to the available offer (according to the user's geo, device, os type, os version, etc.). The offer may have specific geo, os, etc. or all geos, oses, etc.
Smartlinks work by using an algorithm that decides which offer is shown for each specific user. The algorithm takes data about a user and analyses all the information received to send visitors to an offer that is most likely to be converted.
How to start working with smartlinks?
To start working with Smartlinks, you need:
1) Create a Smartlink category in the ‘Smartlinks’ section using the ‘New Smartlink’ button:
2) Fill in the fields:
Where:
Name: name your Smartlink in the way you want
Domain Id: if you have custom tracking domains, you can assign one to this new Smartlink.
Privacy level: set the privacy level for the Smartlink. There are three levels:
-- public – Smartlink is available for all publishers without any request by default. You do not need to enable affiliates for the public Smartlink.
-- pre-moderation – Requires network manager's confirmation for an affiliate to have access to the Smartlink.
-- private – Smartlink is not visible from the affiliate's side, except affiliates connected by the manager from the admin side.
Description: describe which offers are included to your Smartlink.
❗ It is possible to enable/disable the affiliate for a certain Smartlink only on the Smartlink edit page.
The affiliate can request for access on the Affiliate panel. Once he does it, you receive a new ticket in the 'Tickets' section.
3) Once it’s done, you can proceed with adding offers into the created Smartlink right in the 'Offers' section - > 'Offer edit' page - > 'Tracking' tab:
You can also check which offers are added into a specific Smartlink category in the offer’s list:
If you are using our special tool CPAPI, you can easily add a great number of offers into the Smartlink while setting a specific CPAPI campaign:
4) Once several offers are added into the Smartlink, an affiliate can find the same Smartlink category into 'Affiliate panel' - > 'Smartlinks' section:
The subsection 'All' contains all Smartlinks with the 'Public' and 'Premoderation' privacy level. The subsection 'Available' contains all Smartlinks with the 'Public' privacy level as well as those Smartlinks, which the affiliate is enabled for.
❗ Even if the affiliate is connected to the Smartlink, his traffic will be distributed among the offers he is enabled for. If the affiliate is not enabled for any offer, his traffic will be redirected to Global Trafficback URL.
5) Once pressing on a specific smartlink category, Affiliate will see Smartlink itself:
If the affiliate doesn't have access to the Smartlink, he may request it:
Smartlink can also be updated with additional parameters sub1-sub8 if needed.
The link provided as an example:
http://rocketcompany.g2afse.com/sl?id=5a8c148a94864100413a7922&pid=4925you will find:
rocketcompany.g2afse.com - your tracking domain;
id=5a8c148a94864100413a7922 - Affise internal ID of a specific Smartlink;
pid=4925 - Affiliate ordinal ID.
6) Once Smartlink is updated, it’s ready to use by the Affiliate, and traffic can be sent.
How does the Smart Algorithm work?
The algorithm allows involving all Smartlink offers into traffic distribution and selecting the offer according to more precise criteria and calculations.
The selection of the offer is carried out only among the offers of the particular Smartlink. It takes four steps to define the offer where traffic will go to.
Step 1
Click eliminates offers where there is a reason to send the click to the trafficback:
Targeting groups checking: whether there is an offer with a suitable general or personal targeting group.
Offer privacy checking: whether the affiliate has access to an offer (the offer should be public or the affiliate should be connected to the offer).
Caps checking: whether the offer has cap rules of all types and time frames that aren't reached.
Step 2
About 20% of traffic is distributed among all suitable offers. It allows new offers to be involved in the traffic distribution and receive traffic to recalculate EPC and detect changes in performance over time.
Step 3
The rest 80% of traffic is distributed among offers with the highest EPC. EPC is calculated over last 7 days based on the following attributes:
EPC of this particular Smartlink.
EPC of this particular affiliate, who the click belongs to.
EPC of the country, which the click was made from.
EPC of the OS, which the click was made from.
Step 4
If there is no opportunity to calculate EPC, (no enough data, the Smartlink is new, zero revenue and payout in the offer, and so on), 80% of traffic goes to 10 random offers.
❗ EPC = Revenue of conversions of all statuses except Declined / number of clicks.
We recommend you to have at least one public offer (available for all active affiliates) without any restrictions in order to let traffic be led to at least one relevant offer in the Smartlink.
Where can I check Statistics for a specific Smartlink?
The statistics for you Smartlinks are shown on the separate slice.
You also can filter by a certain Smartlink in the following slices:
Custom
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Advertisers
Account managers
Affiliates managers
Offers
Affiliates
Countries
Cities
OS
Device brand
Mobile ISP
Connection type
Landing
Smartlink via API
You can get the information about all Smartlinks you have in Admin panel via this method:
GET /3.0/admin/smartlink/categories
https://api.affise.com/docs3.1/#smartlink-categories126You also can see the number of offers in some particular Smartlink:
GET /3.0/admin/smartlink/category/{id}/offers-count
https://api.affise.com/docs3.1/#smartlink-offer-count130Also there is an opportunity to add a new Smartlink, to edit or to delete the existent Smartlink:
Add: POST /3.0/admin/smartlink/category
https://api.affise.com/docs3.1/#smartlink-category
Edit: POST /3.0/admin/smartlink/category/{ID}
https://api.affise.com/docs3.1/#smartlink-edit-category
Remove: POST /3.0/admin/smartlink/category/{ID}/remove
https://api.affise.com/docs3.1/#smartlink-category-removeAffiliates can get the information about available Smartlinks via API:
GET /3.0/partner/smartlink/categories
https://api.affise.com/docs3.1/#smartlink-categoriesAnd they also can see the number of offers in some particular Smartlink:
GET /3.0/partner/smartlink/category/{id}/offers-count
https://api.affise.com/docs3.1/#smartlink-offer-countYou can add a Smartlink category to the offer by using the parameter 'smartlink_categories' with using of this method:
POST /3.0/admin/offer
https://api.affise.com/docs3.1/#add-offerThe following articles can be helpful:
Should you have any further doubts or questions on Smartlinks, feel free to contact our support team via [email protected] or your dedicated Affise Account Manager.