links to affiliate merchant

links with no affiliate info?

[aijohn]

As a publisher trying to learn about affiliate marketing, I have been looking at several sites to see how to set up pages.

On some sites with pages about an affiliate program, I see a text or image link that goes to the affiliate advertiser and I can see the affiliate linking info.

On the same page there will be another image which links to the same site, but no info, just a link to somemerchant.com.

Looks like the affilate would get credit for the first two links but not the third one. Each seemed to have equal likelihood of attracting my click.

I must be missing something. Would appreciate any help on this.

[AdChase]

aijohn,

It depends. For example, CJ has an option for a publisher to hide tracking information, converting the link to somemerchant.com. Probably you've seen a page with different types of links - hidden and not hidden.
It's up to publisher to decide which link to use. If you want to earn money - there should be a link with tracking, if not - just a link to a merchant site.

[Shawn Collins]

There are a few companies (FusionQuest, KowaBunga Technologies and Link Connector) that offer affiliate tracking technology where it's a direct link and the affiliate is identified by the referring domain.

The technologies associate an affiliate id with a domain, so the affiliates can link directly to the merchant URLs.