What is a Smartlink in Affiliate Marketing & How To Earn From It?

Being in the performance marketing business for years now, we’ve noticed something that affiliate marketers have been struggling with—choosing the right country and offer for their traffic.

Some choose randomly, selecting based on which has the highest payout, or the highest network EPC, or even gut feel!

But there’s actually an easier way to earn from your traffic without having to spend hours upon hours just selecting an offer.

It’s simple really: use a smartlink.

What is a Smartlink?

A Smartlink is a great tool that makes your life as an affiliate marketer easier than ever before.

Instead of using several offer links in different campaigns, you create a single Smartlink in a few seconds and implement it in all your campaigns.

This is a great timesaver and lets you get on with finding high-converting traffic sources.

There are all sorts of ways to use Smartlinks as part of your strategy, as you’ll see later.

How do Smartlinks Work?

Have you ever wondered what makes the Smartlink so smart?

A Smartlink automatically recognizes where your traffic is coming from (and other click details), and matches it with an offer that has the highest possibility of converting.

This is especially useful if you are finding it difficult to monetize all of your traffic with just a handful of offers.

For example, let’s say you have a RON campaign that converts well for one particular traffic type.

This is all well and good, but what happens to the traffic you can’t send to your offer?

You can set up filters in your tracker to redirect this traffic to another one.

However, doing this for all traffic types can be exhausting.

That’s where smartlink can help you.

You could just set up a Smartlink, which will automatically find the best offers for all of your traffic types.

This gives you the assurance that you will still be able to profit from targeting that isn’t a perfect match for your offer.

We have it here at Mobidea.

Essentially, Mobidea Smartlinks attempts to secure the maximum revenue for you, regardless of where your traffic is coming from.

The offer selection is performed by our built-in powerful algorithm, considering the vertical (adult or mainstream), the country, operator, operating system and device type of the users seeing your campaign.

This algorithm will also stop displaying offers that have a low conversion ratio and keep the best performing offers on rotation.

And it’s not only the offers that they select.

They’ll also be able to select the highest converting landing pages and offers combo to generate the highest EPC using fully responsive designs.

How do You Use a Smartlink?

You can use smart links just like you would use a direct link.

Simply generate your link and use this in your campaigns and the Smartlink will do all the rest of the work for you.

This can also be a great way to test traffic sources and monetize your remnant traffic.

Remnant traffic is the portion of your traffic that you haven’t specifically targeted for any offer.

Or, if you prefer, you can simply use the Smartlink to optimize all of your traffic on a per-click basis.

How to Set up a Smartlink

Setting up your first Smartlink on Mobidea takes just a few clicks.

Head over to your dashboard and pick one of the six Smartlink types available today:

• Mainstream
• CPI
• Adult
• Dating
• Mainstream Middle East PIN/SMS Flow
• Premium Dating Smartlink (this one isn’t self-serve, you’ll need to reach out to your affiliate manager first)

Pick the one that matches your traffic or the one you want to test, then click “Go for it!”

You’ll see a pop-up with the Mandatory Rules for that Smartlink.

Read and confirm.

Make sure you follow, since illegal traffic can mean non-payment, so this step matters more than it looks.

Once you save, your new link shows up at the bottom of the Smartlink page, ready for use.

Want more control?

Click the pencil icon next to your Smartlink to edit.

You’ll find a few toggles worth knowing:

• Postback URL for S2S tracking
• APK offers
• Auto-download offers
• Back offers

Checking Your Smartlink Stats

Click Affiliate Network in the main menu, then Stats per Smartlinks.

This opens your Analytics dashboard, which is separate from the direct offers stats.

You can view your results as Totals, Table, Line Chart, Bar Chart, or Heatmap (Grid view is still in Beta).

Table view is the one most affiliates use.

You can split your data by Country, Browser, OS, Offer ID, and dozens of other options.

You can stack up to 5 splits at once.

Data refreshes hourly by default, though you can switch to auto-update every few minutes when testing a new segment closely.

Your Smartlink Also Works as a Safety Net

Once you’re running Single Offers and you can’t stop the traffic immediately when the offer is capped, Mobidea’s Smartlink makes sure this traffic doesn’t go to waste.

If a Single Offer hits its daily or network-wide cap, your traffic automatically falls back to the Smartlink instead of going to waste.

Can I Make Money with Smartlinks?

Yes!
But while Smartlinks are an amazing tool for affiliates, they’re not an instant win button for printing money.

They can be used to find the best performing offer for any GEO, lander and offer combination.

However, for long-term success, you should be using Smartlinks strategically.

Smartlinks work by finding the best offer for your traffic segment.

While they can boost your conversions it’s better to view them as a tool you can use and not just a simple fire-and-forget method to making profits.

Most affiliates would typically use Smartlinks in connection with a pre-determined strategy such as a safety net for capped offers, using a back button redirect script or second chance offers.

We cannot deny that some affiliates are able to succeed with running smartlinks alone, but tread lightly.

Advantages of Smartlinks

There’s more than one reason why Smartlinks have become a staple for affiliates:

1. Can Monetize Remnant Traffic

One of the appeals of Smartlinks is that they can convert even cheap clicks and remnant traffic.

Which is why it works well on RON, which is pretty cheap as you’re not bidding exclusively on one specific traffic segment.

Remember though that you won’t always convert this traffic source at the same rate, so you will still want to have your winning offers in play alongside your Smartlink campaigns.

2. Helps Narrow Down Offers or Niches/Verticals

Smartlinks are great for finding the gold in different traffic sources.

You can ask your manager which offers are converting once you’ve had a decent number of conversions.

You can then ask for a direct offer to create a separate campaign.

Note: Some offers are only available for use with Smartlinks.

You can always check with your AM to find out if this is the case in the segment you are targeting.

If they don’t have a direct offer, you can at least know the niche or vertical where your traffic converts.

3. Makes You Worry Less About Overflow Traffic

If your offer gets capped and you’re asleep or can’t pause the campaign immediately, you can at least be assured that you have a chance of earning back the cost of traffic that was sent to your direct link.

This is not always available on affiliate networks that have smart links, but we have that feature here at Mobidea.

It’s these types of functionality like this that make a lot of affiliates consider Mobidea as the best CPA affiliate network in the industry, especially for beginners.

Drawbacks & Challenges

Smartlinks solve a lot of problems, but they’re not magic.

Let’s talk about a few things worth keeping in mind before you lean on them too heavily.

1. Less Control on Offers

We mentioned above that you can send all your traffic to the Smartlink.

If you choose to go down this route, you won’t have as much control over what offers are being shown.

2. Unpredictable ROI

You’ll also find that as offers are frequently swapped out, your ROI could fluctuate by a fairly wide margin.

This is because different offers have different payouts.

3. High Chance of Aggressive Landers

You also need to be careful with Smartlinks since their choice of landers can be quite aggressive.

This can lead to your campaign getting rejected due to non-compliance, as forbidden landers and offers that you have no control over could be shown to users through no fault of your own.

4. Your Results Depend on the Network’s Offer Pool

A Smartlink is only as good as what’s behind it.

Thin inventory in your GEO means thin results, no matter how smart the algorithm is.

Remember that traffic quality still matters here.

Garbage in, garbage out still applies.

None of this means skip Smartlinks.

It just means treat them as one tool in your kit, not the whole toolbox.

When Should You Use a Smartlink (and When Not To)

Use a Smartlink when:

• Your traffic is mixed, global, or hard to segment
• You have no idea which offer pr niche converts best for a new GEO or vertical
• You’re testing a new traffic source and want data before committing
• You’re running Single Offers and want a safety net for capped or overflow traffic

Go with a Direct Offer instead when:

• You already know exactly which offer converts for your audience
• Full control over payout, cap, and creative is necessary
• Your traffic is highly targeted to one GEO or vertical

The less certain you are about your traffic, the more you should use a Smartlink.

Most experienced affiliates don’t pick one forever.

Sometimes, they start broad with a Smartlink and watch what converts.

Then they create campaigns for Direct Offers once the data’s clear.

Other times, it’s the reverse, they create a direct offer, then add a Smartlink for traffic that gets filtered out of the main campaign.

Summary

Smartlinks are easy to set up and offer a great deal of versatility to affiliates.

They’re a great way to monetize RON or remnant traffic and can save valuable time.

It’s important to remember that the quality of traffic is still important and you should test your own offers against the Smartlink.

On the flip side, Smartlinks can have lower payouts and make it difficult to effectively monitor traffic quality.

Finally, not all Smartlinks are created equal!

It depends on the network’s database of offers and landers and how well they are optimized for every possible traffic segment.

The Smartlinks we use at Mobidea are rigorously tested against multiple segments and traffic sources.

They include thousands of top-performing offers and are supported by powerful algorithms that work to boost your ROI across all verticals, GEOs, operators, operating system and device types, and carriers.

FAQ

What are Smartlinks used for?

Mostly for monetizing traffic you can’t perfectly match to one offer.

If you have remnant traffic, mixed GEOs traffic, are testing new traffic sources, or catching overflow from a capped Single Offer, that’s where using Smartlinks make sense.

Is a Smartlink the same as a Direct Link?

Not quite. A Direct Link simply means sending traffic directly to the link provided by the affiliate network with no pre-landers (of your own) in between.

Can you make money with Smartlinks?

Yes, though they work best as part of a bigger strategy rather than a stand-alone plan.

Can I Choose My Own Offers?

No. But if you have the right tool, like good third-party trackers that allow multiple flows based on specific metrics, you can create your own smartlink by adding several single offers under one campaign URL.