We’re excited to announce some significant changes to the Affiliate Link Encoder (ALE) tool that we first released just over one year ago. The ALE has proven to be a very successful tool for our affiliate base: nearly 3% of our overall network sales in October 2008 were a result of using the ALE.  By comparison, that’s more sales than our Deal of the Day or Product Display Builder tools, combined!  Hopefully the functionality we’ve added will continue to build on that success, and help blog & forum owners especially continue to use the ALE effectively.

Before getting into the exact details of the improvements, let us state one very important fact: none of the existing ALE deployments will be broken, or indeed affected in any way, by these changes.  We were able to maintain full backwards-compatibility with the original version of the tool, so if you’re already perfectly happy with the functionality of the ALE then you don’t have to change a thing.  But if you want to squeeze just a bit more value out of your content then by all means read on!

So, on to the specifics of the improvements:

• The ALE now supports the encoding of plain text (a.k.a. “keyword encoding”) in your page content.  Previously, only pre-existing direct links such as <a href=”http://…”> www.backcountry.com </a> would be converted to affiliate tracking links.  Now, it’s possible to configure the ALE to not even require an existing direct link to the merchant: instead, it can operate simply on the mention of the merchant, e.g. Backcountry.com (take a look at the source of this page to verify that this link is NOT tagged in any way in the original page content).
• Now you may be thinking: “What about all of my pre-existing links – I don’t want those rewritten!“  Don’t worry, we’re not going to completely mangle your page: keywords that appear inside existing links are left alone.
• With keyword encoding turned on, the ALE will (by default) automatically look for the name or URL of any of your active merchants in page content, and turn those into trackable links.  You can override this default behavior by choosing which, if any, merchants should be encoded for a given ALE deployment.
• You can also specify completely custom keyword/key-phrase associations to encode.  For instance, the ALE subscription used for this blog post is set up to link the phrase “Love the Madness” to moosejaw.com, and “Gear Store” to altrec.com.
• You can even specify certain pieces of text that should not be encoded as affiliate links; some people call these skip-words.  That’s why “www.backcountry.com” a few sentences above (and here) is not showing as a link: in the ALE configuration for this blog post, that phrase is set up as something to ignore.
• We’ve added the ability to specify some CSS/formatting for your encoded links.  Built-in options include adding a “title” tag of “This is an affiliate ad link.”, a double-underline format, or even specifying a custom CSS class name to use for all of the links.  You can mix & match these options too, to further customize your setup.
• Lastly, when you use the ALE tool now you actually create a subscription/configuration entry.  This allows you to make changes to your ALE deployment without going back through all of your pages to update the javascript include.  It also allows some more advanced reporting on our end, such as which of your ALE subscriptions a particular click-through or sale resulted from; for keyword encoding our reports will even show which word or phrase was clicked on, leading to a particular sale.

Whether you’re a long-time user of the Affiliate Link Encoder already or just getting started with it, you should definitely take a few minutes to experiment with these new options.  Just go to the “Tools” page of your affiliate account and click on “Create a new ALE subscription”.

Best of luck!

-David & AvantLink