Your Automate Questions, Answered

Automate is Rakuten Affiliate Network’s solution to manually deep linking your affiliate links. We sat down with the product manager of Automate, James Fish – who prefers to be called Fish, to learn a little more about this tool and its benefits.  

Q: So what exactly is Automate?
Fish: Automate is a simple javascript snippet that, when installed into your website theme, will automatically convert your standard advertiser links into commission-generating affiliate links.

Q: Well that seems very convienent for publishers! How does it work?
Fish: When a user or customer clicks on a link on your site, Automate will instantaneously check if you have a partnership with that advertiser. If you do, it will convert the link into the appropriate affiliate link and send the user through. This link will give you a commission just like any manually created affiliate link.

Q: What makes Automate unique?
Fish: Automate will create affiliate links to advertisers you are partnered with through Rakuten Affiliate Network. However, if a link is already affiliated or the advertiser is not in our network, that link will remain unchanged letting other network scripts or tools run on that link. Automate will never block those from running.

Q: How does Automate improve the publisher’s affiliate experience? In other words, what’s in it for the publishers? 
Fish: Manually creating affiliate deep links can be time consuming, and if your partnerships change, you would have to redo all your existing links. With Automate, you don’t have to worry about manually inserting or editing affiliate links, Automate will do this for you. It keeps track of new or changing partnerships and will add or updated affiliate links for you automatically.

Wow! Automate sounds really easy-to-use and very helpful when creating affiliate links for your site. Thank you for answering some of our questions Fish!

If you have any further Automate questions, you can reach Fish at james.fish@rakuten.com or ask your account representative.