Cloak links and sell ads in one plugin

What ThirstyAffiliates is and who it suits

ThirstyAffiliates is a WordPress plugin for managing affiliate links. On its own site it describes tools to cloak and brand affiliate URLs, organise a large library, track clicks, auto-insert links by keyword, send visitors to regional stores, and find broken links. Its wordpress.org listing shows a free plugin with a paid Pro add-on.

It suits bloggers and affiliate marketers whose income depends on promoting many products. Its site leans hard on Amazon Associates, with smart uncloaking, product displays and a product importer.

We checked its own site and its wordpress.org listing before writing this page. Where we say it has a feature, that is the vendor’s own wording. Where a feature is not listed on those pages, we say so rather than guess.

The real difference is what else the plugin does

ThirstyAffiliates is a tool about links, and it goes deep on them. WB Ad Manager is an ad plugin first. Link cloaking is one section of it, next to banner ads, AdSense, scheduling and sponsor slots.

That changes who should choose which. If you spend your day building roundups and comparing products, a link toolkit with product boxes is the sharper tool. If your site also sells a banner to a local sponsor and shows AdSense in the sidebar, one plugin for all of it is easier to keep updated.

There is also a question of focus. A link plugin that ships product boxes, auto-linking, geo redirects and checkout links keeps adding to one idea. An ad plugin that cloaks links keeps adding to a wider one. Neither is wrong, but the first gives you more depth on links and the second gives you more range across the site.

What we do not do

We want to be plain about the gaps for this buyer.

• No product display boxes with images, prices and buttons.
• No Amazon product search or import, and no smart uncloaking that switches by merchant.
• No checkout or payment links for selling your own products.
• No automatic nofollow sponsored attributes and no automatic disclosure.
• No importer built for ThirstyAffiliates, only a general CSV import in Pro.

Creating, cloaking and tracking a link, step by step

Everything here is in the free plugin unless the step says Pro. Links have their own top-level menu, with All Links, Categories and Partnerships.

1. Open Links, then Add New Link. Give the link a name that only you see, such as the merchant and the month.
2. Paste the destination URL, with your affiliate parameters included. Visitors reach it after the click.
3. Leave the slug empty to have one generated, or write your own. The branded URL uses a prefix, which is go by default and can be changed in Settings.
4. Pick a category if you want one, and leave the cloaking switch on.
5. Tick sponsored. Nofollow is already ticked on new links, but sponsored is not.
6. Choose a redirect type (the default is a temporary 307, and 301 or 302 are available per link), set an expiry date if the offer ends, and save.

Placing the link in a post

You can paste the cloaked URL anywhere a link is accepted. You can also use a shortcode that prints a link with your anchor text, a shortcode that returns only the URL, or a shortcode that lists a whole category. The new-tab option applies to the shortcode only. A pasted cloaked URL opens in the same tab unless you add the target yourself.

Changing a destination later

This is the main reason to cloak at all. When a merchant changes its URL or you move to a better programme, you edit the destination on the one link. Every post that uses the branded URL points to the new place from then on. You can also mark a link inactive to switch it off without deleting it, which keeps its click count.

Categories, expiry and clicks

Categories group links, filter the list, and drive the category shortcode. Expiry dates are free. The All Links screen shows a sortable Clicks column, which is a running count per link. That is the whole free tracking story.

Selling sponsor space beside your links

Many affiliate sites also get approached by brands that want a banner or a sponsored mention. In the free plugin, a partnership inquiry form lets sponsors contact you, and you review the inquiries under Links.

For the ads themselves, the free plugin has five ad types, including Google AdSense, and more than a dozen placement spots in your pages. AdSense and a direct sponsor in the same slot share it. Each page view shows one of them, picked at random and weighted by a priority from 1 to 10, where 5 is the default. A direct campaign does not override AdSense. A sponsor at priority 10 next to AdSense at priority 1 gets about 91 percent of views.

Scheduling decides whether an ad is in the pool at all. Before and after a sponsor’s dates, AdSense has the slot to itself. There is no fallback logic that swaps in a house ad when something fails.

What Pro adds for selling

Pro adds an advertiser portal where members build and submit campaigns, a moderation queue where you approve or reject before anything goes live, and a prepaid wallet. You find the advertisers. The plugin handles the page where they pay and the approval step. Insertion orders and invoices are not part of either plugin. Read more on the direct sponsor ads use case.

What you can measure

Free gives you a click count per link, and Impressions and Clicks columns for ads, plus a click-through comparison for ads in the same slot. Impressions are counted when the server renders the ad, so fully cached pages undercount. There is no Reports screen in the free plugin.

Pro adds advanced link analytics. For each click it can record a hashed IP, the device type, the referring page and the country, which is how you learn which post sends the clicks. It also has an Ad Analytics screen, a revenue view and a CSV export.

A click count tells you that people used a link. It does not tell you whether they bought, and it counts bots and repeat clicks the same as buyers. Use it to compare your own links against each other, such as two roundup posts, and take earnings from the merchant.

ThirstyAffiliates lists click reports in the free listing and, in Pro, reports by category, by time of day and by location. If reporting is your main need, compare the two carefully and treat both as your own counts. Your affiliate network’s dashboard remains the source for what you earned.

Disclosure and what the site owner must do

Cloaking does not disclose anything. A branded link is still an affiliate link, and readers and regulators expect you to say so.

The plugin does not add rel=“nofollow sponsored” for you in bulk and has no setting that makes it the default. It gives each link two checkboxes, with nofollow ticked for new links and sponsored not. You write the disclosure sentence in your posts yourself. The only disclosure feature is the ad label, which is “Advertisement” by default and applies to ads, not links.

A cloaked link is also not hidden after the click. It is a normal redirect, so the visitor’s address bar shows the destination, parameters included. Cloaking tidies the link before the click only. Our guide on affiliate link disclosure covers wording.

What each costs to run

Both are plugins on your own hosting, so both add to your server work on every link click. ThirstyAffiliates lists a faster redirect option for busy sites in its Pro tier. We have no equivalent, so a very heavy link site should test redirect speed before committing.

On upkeep, you update the plugin and keep a licence current for paid features. With WB Ad Manager the core is free and Pro is a paid yearly licence, shown on the pricing page. For ThirstyAffiliates, check the vendor’s site for current licence terms.

Neither plugin removes the need for a good host. A cloaked click is a request to your server, so a link in a popular post runs PHP every time it is clicked. That is the same for both products, and caching rules should leave the link prefix alone.

Data and privacy

The free link counter stores a number and a link ID per click, nothing else. Pro link analytics stores a hashed IP, and its country lookup may use an IP geolocation service. Ad country targeting does the same, with ip-api as the default provider. IPs are anonymized with a daily-rotating hash. There are no third-party tracking pixels, but a country lookup does send the visitor’s IP to a geolocation service.

Moving over from ThirstyAffiliates

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

You export from ThirstyAffiliates, rename the header row to match, and import. There is no screen for mapping columns, so the renaming happens in your spreadsheet. Duplicate destination URLs are skipped by default. Click totals and expiry dates are not carried over, so keep a copy of the old numbers.

After the import, open a handful of links and check them by hand. Look at the redirect type, the sponsored box and the category, because defaults apply when a column is missing. A missing nofollow column means nofollow on, a missing sponsored column means sponsored off, and a missing redirect column means 307.

Set your prefix first. The branded URL uses the prefix you choose in Settings, so you can match your old one if you need existing shared links to keep working. Test on a staging copy before you switch live.

Launch checklist

1. Install the free plugin from the Wbcom Designs checkout and set the link prefix.
2. Decide where expired links should go, and choose the fallback in Settings.
3. Create two or three test links and click them logged out.
4. Tick sponsored on every affiliate link, and write a disclosure line in your theme or post template.
5. If you move from another plugin, export, rename the headers, and import to a staging copy first.
6. Check that your robots rules do not block the link prefix, then compare click counts against your network’s dashboard after a week.

Running next to 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, but you install, host and update each one yourself.

If you run a community, BuddyNext is the community plugin, Jetonomy is a forum and Q&A plugin, Learnomy handles courses, Listora is a directory, WP Career Board is a job board, WP Sell Services is a services marketplace and WB Gamification adds points and badges. The themes BuddyX Pro and Reign are separate again. Each of those builds an audience that is worth selling space against.

The honest picture for an affiliate publisher is simple. A directory, forum or course site gives you more pages where a relevant link or a sponsor slot belongs. We do not claim that these products share data with the link cloaker.

The real connections we can state are narrower. Free ad placements include spots for BuddyPress, bbPress and Jetonomy pages. Pro includes a BuddyPress integration that adds advertiser tabs to member profiles, posts activity when an ad is approved, and sends notifications. See the full stack use case for how people combine them.

Other alternatives worth a look

• Pretty Links is a link shortener for every kind of link, including social and podcast links, and wins if links are your whole job.
• Lasso wins when product display boxes and link alerts matter more than a light cloaker.
• 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 space directly.
• All alternatives lists every comparison on this site, including two hosted options.

Who should stay with ThirstyAffiliates

Stay if Amazon Associates drives most of your income. Smart uncloaking, the product importer and product displays are aimed at exactly that, and we have nothing equivalent.

Stay if you have thousands of links with years of click history. Our importer will not carry that history across, and rebuilding it is rarely worth the move.

Stay if you do not run ads. A site with no banners, no AdSense and no sponsors gets little from an ad plugin, and the extra is just more to maintain. If one day you start selling space, you can add WB Ad Manager then. See the link cloaking page for the free feature set.