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How do affiliates get their tracking links?

An affiliate's tracking link appears in the affiliate portal once they are approved for your campaign, ready to copy. Affiliates you import or create through the API have no portal, so you send them their link yourself.

2 min read
Updated Sep 15, 2026

Affiliates who sign up get their link in the portal. Affiliates you bring in yourself need the link from you.

In the affiliate portal

A tracking link appears once the affiliate is approved for the campaign, not the moment they apply. That is immediate on a campaign with Auto-Approve switched on, and immediate when someone accepts an emailed invitation. On a campaign set to manual approval they apply, see "Awaiting merchant approval" where the copy button would be, and get their link as soon as you approve them.

After that they sign in, open Campaigns in the portal, and copy the link for any campaign they are part of. Each link already carries the parameters that attribute clicks back to them. Links are withheld while an affiliate is suspended.

Affiliates you import or create through the API

An affiliate brought in by the importer, or created through the Developer API, has no login and no portal, and we send them no email. You hand over their link. Use Copy Link on the Campaigns table, or open the campaign and use the Tracking Links section, then pick the affiliate.

Short links are not automatic. They need Professional or Ultimate, the "Use affiliate names in links" setting switched on under Affiliate portal in your sidebar, and a page for affiliates to promote set on the campaign. Approved affiliates with a login then get a clean link:

www.linkjolt.io/l/sarah-jones yourbrand.linkjolt.io/l/sarah-jones partners.yourcompany.com/sarah-jones

The second form appears once your brand has its own subdomain, and the third once an Ultimate or Scale brand connects its own domain. All three resolve and attribute identically, so anything shared earlier keeps working. Without that setting the portal shows the longer form instead, which reads /redirect?tc=CODE&aff=ID and tracks exactly the same.

Campaigns that use Shopify App Billing are the exception. Their approved affiliates get a linkjolt.io/s/ address instead, which does not depend on that setting or on your plan.

Coupon codes

If you run coupon based attribution, any code you registered against the affiliate works at the same time, so they can share a link, a code, or both.

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