Link cloaking without product displays

What Lasso is and who it suits

Lasso presents itself as an affiliate link tool for WordPress and YouTube. Its site describes product displays, comparison tables, link shortening on your own domain, simple click tracking, and alerts for broken or out-of-stock links. It also describes a marketplace for brand deals.

It suits publishers who write product reviews and roundups, especially around Amazon. Its wordpress.org listing describes a free plugin called Lasso Lite, which cloaks links, adds product displays and keeps a basic click count.

We read its home page, pricing page and listing before writing this. The claims about Lasso here are its own wording. If a feature is not on the pages we read, we say it was not listed.

The real difference is a display tool versus a plain cloaker

Lasso is a product-presentation system with link management attached. The link is a means to put a good-looking product box in front of a reader. The plugin and its account exist to make those boxes, tables and alerts easy.

WB Ad Manager goes the other way. The link is a plain branded redirect, and the weight of the plugin is in ad placement and sales. If you want a presentation layer for product mentions, we do not have one. If you want a quiet cloaker that sits beside your ads, we do.

Think about what your readers see. On a review site, the box with an image, a price and a button is part of the page, and it can do more than a text link. On a news or tutorial site, a text link in a sentence is often all you want. The right plugin follows the page you publish.

What we do not do

• No product display boxes and no comparison tables.
• No broken-link detection in the free plugin, and no out-of-stock alerts at all.
• No link-in-bio pages, no YouTube support and no browser extension.
• No importer built for Lasso, only a general CSV import in Pro.
• No automatic nofollow sponsored attribute and no automatic disclosure.

Creating, cloaking and tracking a link, step by step

The steps below use the free plugin. Links have a top-level menu with All Links, Categories and Partnerships.

1. Go to Links, then Add New Link, and enter a private name.
2. Paste the destination URL. Your affiliate parameters belong here, because the visitor reaches this address after the click.
3. Type a slug or leave it empty for a generated one. The prefix is go by default and can be changed in Settings.
4. Choose a category if you use them.
5. Tick sponsored, and leave nofollow ticked, which is the default for new links.
6. Check the redirect type (the default is a temporary 307, and 301 or 302 can be chosen for any link), add an expiry date if the offer ends, and save.

Where the link goes in your content

Paste the cloaked URL into a post, menu or widget. If you want anchor text with full control over attributes, use the link shortcode. A second shortcode returns only the URL, and a third lists a whole category. The new-tab option applies to the shortcode only.

Keeping links healthy without a checker

Links go dead, and free has no checker for it. A manual habit works for a small library. Sort All Links by Clicks, open the top twenty once a month, and confirm each still lands on a live page. Switch off anything dead by marking it inactive, or give it an expiry date.

Pro automates this. Its checker runs twice a day on a schedule and flags cloaked links whose destination has stopped working. It does not know whether a product is out of stock, since it checks that the destination responds, not what the page says.

Free and Pro for links

• Free: cloaked links, redirect choice, categories, expiry dates and a click count per link.
• Free: a partnership inquiry form.
• Pro: keyword auto-linking and a link scanner for raw affiliate URLs.
• Pro: a broken-link checker that runs on a schedule.
• Pro: advanced link analytics, and a CSV import for bringing links in.

Ads, AdSense and sponsors beside your links

Lasso’s pages describe tools for affiliate earnings. We did not find ad placement or ad selling listed on the pages we read. If you run both affiliate links and ads, you would need a second plugin next to Lasso.

In WB Ad Manager the free plugin has five ad types, including Google AdSense, with more than a dozen placement spots. AdSense and a direct sponsor in the same slot share it. Each page view shows one, picked at random and weighted by a priority from 1 to 10, with 5 as the default.

A direct campaign does not override AdSense. A sponsor at 10 next to AdSense at 1 gets about 91 percent of views. Scheduling decides whether an ad is in the pool, so AdSense has the slot alone before and after a sponsor’s dates. There is no fallback logic.

Selling space directly

Free has a partnership inquiry form, so sponsors approach you instead of using a mailto link. Pro adds an advertiser portal where members build campaigns, a moderation queue where you approve or reject them, and prepaid credits topped up through Stripe, PayPal or a billing plugin you already use. You bring the advertisers, and there are no insertion orders or invoices.

What you can measure

In free, you see a click count per link in a sortable Clicks column, and Impressions and Clicks columns for ads. There is no Reports screen. Impressions count when the server renders the ad, so fully cached pages undercount.

Pro advanced link analytics records a hashed IP, device type, referring page and country on each click. It tells you which post sends the clicks. Pro also adds an Ad Analytics screen and revenue by placement.

Lasso describes simple click tracking in its free plan and more advanced analytics in higher plans. Its tracking uses a redirect or JavaScript, depending on setup. Its Lite listing says a free account gives clearer reports. If you want reports in a hosted dashboard, that is a point for Lasso. If you want to keep numbers on your own server, that is a point for us.

Disclosure and what you must still do

Cloaking is not disclosure. A branded link is still an affiliate link.

This plugin does not add rel=“nofollow sponsored” automatically and has no global setting for it. Each link has two checkboxes, nofollow on for new links and sponsored off. Tick sponsored on every affiliate link. You write the disclosure sentence in your content yourself. The ad label, “Advertisement” by default, is for ads and not for links.

In practice the site owner’s list is short:

• Tick sponsored on every affiliate link.
• Write a plain disclosure line near the top of any post with affiliate links.
• Keep the disclosure honest if you also show sponsored banners on the same page.
• Check the rules of each affiliate programme, because some restrict redirects.

Also remember that cloaking only tidies the link before the click. The redirect is a normal one, and the address bar then shows the destination and its parameters. Our affiliate link disclosure guide has wording you can adapt.

What each costs to run, and your data

Lasso asks you to create an account, pick a plan and connect your site, and its pricing is per property. Check the vendor’s site for current plans. Its free Lite plugin works for core features without an account, according to its listing.

Time is the other cost. A display-led tool takes longer to set up per product, because each box has an image, a price and a button to get right. A plain link takes seconds, but it also does less per mention. Decide how many products you will feature in a year, then count the minutes.

WB Ad Manager runs entirely inside your WordPress install. The core is free and Pro is a paid yearly licence, shown on the pricing page. Upkeep for both means keeping the plugin updated.

On data, our free link counter stores a number and a link ID. Pro link analytics stores a hashed IP and may use an IP geolocation service for country. Ad country targeting does the same, with ip-api as the default provider. We run no third-party tracking pixels. For Lasso, ask the vendor what its account receives from your site, because we did not confirm that.

Moving over from Lasso

There is no importer built for Lasso. Pro has a general CSV importer under Links. Your file needs a header row with name and destination_url columns, and it can also read slug, link type, nofollow, sponsored, description and keywords.

If Lasso lets you export your links, rename the headers to match and import. We have not tested a Lasso export, so try a small file first. Duplicate destination URLs are skipped by default. There is no column-mapping screen, and click totals and expiry dates do not come across.

A sensible order for a move looks like this:

1. Export your links from Lasso, if it offers an export.
2. Open the file in a spreadsheet and rename the header row.
3. Remove columns the importer does not read.
4. Import a handful of rows into a staging site.
5. Check the redirect type, sponsored box and prefix on each.
6. Import the rest, then rebuild any pages that relied on display boxes.

Display boxes do not move at all. Links that used a Lasso display need rebuilding as plain links. Do this on a staging copy, and keep Lasso active until every post has been checked.

A fair test before you decide

Pick five posts that earn from affiliate links. Rebuild one of them with plain cloaked links on a staging copy, and compare it to the live version with a display box. Look at clicks over a few weeks, using the same traffic source if you can.

If the plain version holds up, you have learned that the boxes are optional for your audience. If it falls well short, you have learned that Lasso is paying for itself. Either result is worth more than a feature list. We would rather you stay with the right tool than move for the wrong reasons.

Launch checklist

1. Install the free plugin from the Wbcom Designs checkout.
2. Choose the link prefix and the inactive-link action in Settings.
3. Create a test link, then click it logged out.
4. Tick sponsored on every affiliate link, and write a disclosure line for your post template.
5. If you are moving, rebuild any display boxes as plain links on staging.
6. Place an ad in one slot and check it renders on a cached page, then compare click counts with your merchant dashboard after a week.

Running with the rest of the stack

WB Ad Manager is one of several separate plugins from the same team. They run on one WordPress site and one login, and each is installed, hosted and updated on its own.

For a product-review site, the nearest relatives are Listora, a directory plugin, and Jetonomy, for forums and Q&A. The others are BuddyNext for community, Learnomy for courses, WP Career Board for a job board, WP Sell Services for a services marketplace and WB Gamification for points and badges. BuddyX Pro and Reign are themes.

A directory or a forum creates pages that other brands may pay to sit beside. That is the reason to mention them here, not a shared feature. We make no claim that these products share data with the link cloaker.

The connections we can state are narrow. Free ad placements include spots for BuddyPress, bbPress and Jetonomy pages. Pro includes a BuddyPress integration, with advertiser tabs on member profiles, activity posts when an ad is approved, and notifications. The full stack use case shows how people combine them.

Other alternatives worth a look

• ThirstyAffiliates lists Amazon tools and product displays, and wins for Amazon-led sites.
• Pretty Links wins when you share links in email, podcasts and social profiles.
• Advanced Ads is a dedicated WordPress ad plugin, and its page sets out when it is the better pick.
• AdSanity is compared on its own page for sites that sell banner slots directly.
• All alternatives lists every comparison on this site.

Who should stay with Lasso

Stay if product display boxes are what your readers see and click. We do not have them, and a plain link will perform differently.

Stay if broken or out-of-stock links cost you money. Lasso lists alerts for both, and our checker is Pro and covers broken destinations only.

Stay if you work on YouTube or in link-in-bio pages as well as WordPress. Our plugin is for your WordPress site only. If you stay and also sell banner space, run the ads in a separate plugin. The link cloaking page lists what the free cloaker covers.