Best practices for affiliation links

[DanK]

Case:

- Widget news site with affiliation links to widgets, widget rooms and so on.

Affiliation system:

- Internal links to an empty page which redirects to affiliate landing (using the old meta refresh trick at the moment). These empty pages are used to track how many registrations come from our site


So...
1) Almost every page of the site is linking to one of these empty pages and that looks to me like a big waste. Isn't it?
1) What's the best way to work with these affiliation links?

Thank you

[edited by: aakk9999 at 9:22 pm (utc) on Feb 26, 2015]
[edit reason] Widgetised as per TOS [/edit]

[adder]

There are many methods but meta refresh is NOT the best one!

How good are you with php?

I wrote a simple script that grabs a variable from the url string, matches the variable to a pre-defined affiliate url in the database and redirects to the affiliate page.

Basically, all my affiliate urls are like this:
example.com/myscript.php?id=376
I also make sure all these links are "nofollowed"

When somebody clicks this affiliate url, the script will check the database and find which partner is id 376, retrieve the url and do this:

header("refresh:1;$url");

I also place a Google conversion label on myscript.php because I occasionally use PPC and it helps me track conversions. You can place your current tracking code there too.

You can also track the referrer (i.e. your internal page url that generated the click) and the visitor's IP address, and some other metrics, depending on how much detail you need.

I've found that it's beneficial to have full control over the affiliate links.

[dannyboy]

You don't actually have to use a link. You can use a <button> or <input type="button"> tag, sprinkle in some JavaScript onclick events and redirect your users that way. You don't even have to embed links or URL targets anywhere within your HTML code.

You can assign an ID or keyword to the button tag, run an ajax call behind the scenes to query the URL that ID is attached to, then redirect the user based on that.