How Many Affiliate Marketers Use URL Shorteners or Cloak Links?
By Anna Johnson on June 27th, 2010About 4 out of 10 affiliate marketers either disguise affiliate links with URL shorteners or use cloaking devices, such as CGI scripts, .htaccess rules, meta directs or otherwise.
It seems, however, that the remaining 6 out of 10 affiliates may do neither.
According to AffStat’s 2010 survey of 1,150 affiliate marketers, 40.4 percent of affiliates use URL shortening services, and 38.4 percent cloak affiliate links. Since, however, AffStat asked the affiliates it polled about their use of URL shorteners or cloaked affiliate links as separate questions, it’s not clear whether affiliate marketers tend to use one rather than the other, or both.
Nonetheless, we can see, based on AffStat’s data, which URL shorteners are most popular among affiliate marketers:
- ow.ly: 38.9 percent of affiliates
- is.gd: 4.4 percent
- budurl.com: 3.5 percent
- twurl.nl: 3.5 percent
- cli.gs: 1.8 percent
- tinyurl.com: 1.8 percent
- WP Pretty Link: 0.9 percent
- Custom: 0.9 percent
- itshrunk.com: 0.9 percent
- su.pr: 0.9 percent
Source: Missy Ward and Shawn Collins, “2010 Affiliate Summit AffStat Report,” AffStat
