Lately I have been getting questions from Affiliates on how to create custom links or deep links using Share a Sale. This is actually very simple and easy to do. First lets go over what a deep link or custom link is and then I’ll go over the steps in creating one using Share a Sale. BTW, if you do not have a share a sale Affiliate Account, get one as they are an amazing network and above and beyond my preferred one. Also, if you are a Merchant you cannot beat their prices for having a program on the network, not to mention all of the insight and protections you get. Anyways, this is about creating a custom deep link so for once I’m going to keep focused.
Deep Links and Custom Links – Deep Links and Custom Links are the same thing in Affiliate Marketing, for the most part. They are linking to a particular page or post in a site, or a particular product or category or a page that is not available through the regular feed or links provided. Affiliates use these if they are promoting a product on your site or a category on your site as it takes their traffic to more relevant pages. Merchants don’t always provide them because they either don’t think of it or they could have hundreds and thousands of these and it just doesn’t make sense to make them all themselves or let the Affiliates create them as needed. Not to mention it will crowd their banners and links sections if they listed 100 or 1,000 custom deep links and may confuse their Affiliate Partners. So how do you create a custom deep link in Share a Sale?
All you do to create a custom link in Share a Sale is:
- Log into Share a Sale.
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Click create custom link to a page under the get links section.
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Select the Merchant from the first drop down.
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Paste the url you want your traffic to land on without the http:// into the destination url field.
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Do not select create license plate link.
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Click create custom link.
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You will now be directed to a new page where you will see a box with a new longer link in it.
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This is now your custom deep link with your Affiliate ID in it.
- I also recommend adding in one additional step and copying and pasting this link into your browser to make sure it is working.
That’s all it is to create a custom link or deep link in Share a Sale. Merchants, if you do not have this enabled for your Affiliates you should seriously reconsider it. If you need to create multiple links, use your back button on your browser because if you go from step 1 you’ll have to refind that Merchant in the drop down list.
Hope this helps.
9 thoughts on “Creating Deep Links and Custom Links in Share a Sale”
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Thank you for this post. I was so confused on how to create a link that gave me credit!
No problem at all. Happy I could help.
I want to create a deep link that has ‘https://….” is the process the same? I want to create a button that takes users directly to the shopping cart, but I can’t seem to get an answer do that. Do I really want to do that? At any rate, thanks for the post
Hi Jessica,
I believe there is a drop down for https as well as http in the Share a Sale custom link tool.
No problem and thank you for reading!
Adam
some merchants appear to have tracking variables stuck to the end of their url. for instance, http://www.company.com/product1.html may bring up the product i want to link to. the merchant, however, appears to be using some sort of analytics that changes the url to http://www.company.com/product1.html#xyz.123.dpbs
since either one will take the visitor to the correct page, is it best to use the clean, simple url (without the tracking variables) or go with the longer url?
thanks for your simple, well written steps for creating custom links in shareasale.
Hi Randy,
That is up to you and also depends on a merchant by merchant case. Sometimes the merchant uses unique urls with variables to provide additional tracking. Even if you can delete the parameters when creating a custom url or creating deep links in share a sale, you may want to leave it. You can always contact the merchant as well, but make sure you let them know you are trying to create deep links or custom links in share a sale and why.
Hope this helps!
Adam
Hi,
I tried to create a deep link or custom link, got to the second page, but then tried to see if it worked and it did not. Unless I am doing something wrong. Can I get any advice about that?
thanks
Raymond
Unless I could see what you’re doing I can’t really trouble shoot it. One thing that can happen is not removing the http:// or https:// before going to the second page. You may want to look at that. You can also write to ShareASale support at shareasale (at) shareasale (dot) com.