New Affiliate Links screens

Ben C · 18-08-08

Hi guys,

You may have noticed that we have changed the way that dgmPro provides links in the hope of making it easier to find and pickup the link that you want. I've put together a brief description of what we've done below.

All links now have a clickable 'Destination Page', which allows you to click through to the destination page you will be directing through to if you pick up that link. dgmPro is built on content units, so we can provide multiple links per campaign, but it does tend to make it more difficult to decide on which particular link you should choose, hence this change.
All links now have encoded ampersands, which should help if you are trying to make your page code XHTML compliant.
The Network ID* for a link can now be dynamically added into the HTML code that you pick up by entering the desired label into the text box and selecting the change button.
Text links also allow you to change the displayed text from "[Your Text Here]" in the same manner - simply fill in the box and click the change button.
Although it doesn't look so neat, we've changed the links to display within a text box, as copy/pasting from the page in IE often picked up extra bits of data, which then added strange HTML when pasted into the source code editor of certain WYSIWYG HTML editors. This should make picking up links more reliable.
You no longer have to manually highlight the link text in order to copy it - we have provided a 'Select All' button to do it for you.
Banners are now distinguished as being Banner (Standard gif, jpeg, etc), Flash or HTML banners in the banner list.
Standard Banners now feature separate text boxes for the destination URL and image URL to aid pickup. Flash and HTML Banners do not feature these as they must be displayed within an iFrame in order to work correctly.

I'm interested to hear your feedback on these changes, so if you think there is anything we've left out you'd like added in, or we've left you wondering why we did that, please let me know.

Cheers

Ben

* Network IDs are link labels. Every network seems to have their own name for them; Link ID, EPI, etc. For historical reasons ours are called 'Network IDs' and allow you to label all traffic going through individual links so you can distinguish where your sales and/or traffic are coming from. For example, you could label all links 'Home_page' to distingush the sales and clicks driven from that URL from others. Loyalty sites use this feature to distinguish between members and PPC affiliates tend to use it to identify the keywords that have converted to sale.