Direct links enable advertisers to link directly to their site without redirecting through the TUNE tracking servers. The direct links feature is for use by a merchant running their own offers to their own landing page.
About Direct Links
Direct links pass offer and partner ID values to the landing page itself, rather than starting a tracking session on click. Direct links transport the user directly to the advertiser’s site, giving these links SEO value and reducing the potential number of site redirects. Additionally, they provide you with the ability to pass partners their partner IDs on the end of your URL, rather than emailing them a tracking link or having them log in to TUNE.
Limitations
There are a number of other TUNE features which you can’t use with direct links. These include geotargeting, conversion caps, redirect and secondary offers, and the TUNE ad manager. Server-to-server postback offers do not work with direct linking as they do not allow a way to extract a transaction ID from the landing page URL.
Setting Up an Offer with Direct Links
To use this feature, go to the Tracking panel of an offer and click Edit. On the next page, set Direct Links to “Enabled” and click Save. Back on the offer page, find the Generate Tracking panel and copy the “Direct Link Code”.
Important: If you’re sending users to a secure site, you must be using a secure tracking domain and you must be generating a secure link.
Place the code in the HTML of the default offer landing page, and in any other additional landing page URLs that are created. This piece of code will track the click and start the user session by placing a cookie in the user's browser.
Your partners can then access your offer as they normally would, however, their new link appears as a direct link:
www.example.com?offer_id=1&aff_id=1
rather than the standard link format:
http://demo.go2cloud.org/aff_c?offer_id=1&aff_id=1
Additional Tracking Link Parameters
You can still pass additional tracking link parameters into the offer URL like partner sub IDs and source values:
www.example.com?offer_id=1&aff_id=1&aff_sub=test&source=thisisatest