Affiliate tracking links: what they carry, and why the destination is decided at click time

A tracking link is the URL an affiliate sends traffic to. When someone clicks it, LimeliJourney records the click, mints a unique click ID, then instantly redirects the visitor to the offer's landing page. That recorded click is what later ties a conversion back to the affiliate who earned it. The link itself is smaller and smarter than it looks, and understanding what it does — and does not — carry saves a lot of confusion later.

Links are evergreen: the destination is resolved at click time

A generated link carries only IDs — the offer, the affiliate, the campaign, and so on. No landing-page URL is baked into it. At the moment of the click, the tracker looks up where to send the visitor from your current configuration, in a clear order of precedence: a creative's landing-page override first, then the campaign's landing page, then the offer's default contract page, and finally the offer's own default landing page.

This has a genuinely useful consequence. Because the destination is resolved live, changing a landing page updates every link already distributed — no regenerating, no re-sending to affiliates. The change reaches live links within about five minutes.

For security, the tracker only ever sends visitors to a destination you have configured on the creative, campaign, or offer. It deliberately ignores any landing-page URL someone tries to pin onto the link itself, so a link can never be rewritten to send your traffic to an arbitrary site. That is also why the builder has no "custom URL" field: there is nothing to type, because there is nothing a pasted URL could safely do. To point one affiliate at a specific page, set it as that campaign's landing page instead.

What you choose when you build one

An active tracking domain is the one prerequisite — links are always minted on a domain your account owns, such as track.yourbrand.com. From there you pick an offer, an affiliate, and optionally a campaign, channel, and creative. Because a campaign is a specific offer-and-affiliate pairing, the campaign choices narrow to match the two you picked first.

A finished link is compact, something like track.yourbrand.com/c?o=12&aff=34&cmp=56. On redirect, the click ID (ll_cid) and visitor ID (ll_vid) are appended to the landing page URL so your conversion pixel can use them later.

Sub-IDs for segmenting traffic

Every link accepts five optional passthrough labels, s1 through s5, for segmenting traffic. By convention s1 is the traffic source — use stable, reusable values like s1=newsletter. You can pre-fill them when you build the link, or let the affiliate append their own.

Test it before you send it

Before a link goes out, run a test click through it. The test performs a dry-run click and conversion flagged so they stay out of your live reports, and it shows you the exact landing page the link currently resolves to — a quick way to confirm a visitor lands where you expect.

Want to watch a link get built, clicked, and attributed end to end on your own offers? Book a demo and we will wire it up with you.